Friday, October 28:

"Communicating Your Work: Are You?"
Felice Frankel, Research Scientist. MIT

Abstract

Have you ever tried to explain your work to your mother? Does it matter if she gets it?

In this talk, I will suggest to the Vis2005 community that it DOES matter and to encourage you to communicate to the world what you're work is about. Using the photographs I've made of science research, I will discuss my personal perspective on visual thinking and to encourage you to consider our common challenges in expressing complicated ideas with an accessible visual language.

Bio

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Frankel creates images and other forms of scientific visual expressions for journal submissions, presentations and publications for general audiences.

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for her previous work photographing the built landscape and architecture. Her regularly appearing column, "Sightings", in American Scientist Magazine addresses the importance of visual thinking in science and engineering.

Her latest book Envisioning Science, The Design and Craft of the Science Image is now out in paperback. She is coauthor with Harvard chemist George M. Whitesides of On the Surface of Things, Images of the Extraordinary in Science. She has just organized the second Image and Meaning conference at the Getty Center in LA, with researchers, science image-makers, computer scientists and writers. The purpose is to develop new approaches to promote the public understanding of science through visual expression. (web.mit.edu/i-m) Frankel's work has been profiled in the New York Times, LIFE Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Science Friday, and the Christian Science Monitor among others. Her images and graphical representations have appeared on the covers and inside pages of Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, PNAS, Wired, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, New Scientist, and others. Her most recent exhibition is currently traveling in Europe.