An SMFA-Biomedical Engineering collaboration pairs artists with scientists to turn research into visual stories
SMFA at Tufts students created art that translated science to an illustrated story. Illustrations: Courtesy of Jimmy Yu and Vivian Gao
Tuberculosis bacteria committing a museum heist. A stem cell balancing on a spinal cord tightrope. No, these aren’t scenes from the animated, biology-inspired children’s movie Osmosis Jones. They’re works of art depicting anthropomorphized microbes and cells, created as part of a new collaboration between the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Nisha Iyer and SMFA Associate Dean of Curriculum and Instruction and Professor of the Practice Chantal Zakari brought students and researchers from different Tufts campuses together, pairing art students with research labs to help scientists communicate their work.
The pilot took the form of an internship for two students. Over two five-week cycles, each student worked with two labs to create narrative artwork for research papers. The art will be submitted to scientific journals alongside the papers in hopes that it might be selected as a cover. Each student received two class credits for their efforts.
Zakari and Iyer want the program to give SMFA students experience working with clients on commissioned projects while helping scientists strengthen their communication skills and the accessibility of their research.
“The idea is to create mutually beneficial learning opportunities for our students. Improving scientific engagement with lay audiences is a huge skill that we’re always trying to teach our engineering graduate students and researchers,” Iyer said. “We’re also creating opportunities for SMFA students to cultivate portfolio-quality work and client-based experiences, and giving them exposure through our publication and presentation efforts.”
“The structure gives enough space and time to develop several conceptual ideas and still have space for mistakes and revisions,” Zakari said. “The challenge is to take all that technical and theoretical knowledge they learn in the classroom and apply it to narrating research that is taking place in the labs.”
For the Quinn Lab, Jimmy Yu created a cartoon representation of an adversarial generative network. This network virtually stains wound tissue images by generating the appearance of hematoxylin and eosin staining from images obtained from multiphoton microscopy. Illustration: Courtesy of Jimmy Yu
A Heist of Microscopic Proportion
Timothy Fitzgerald, a Ph.D. student at Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, in collaboration with fellow biomedical engineering student Joshua Whiteley, works in the Aldridge Lab at Tufts University School of Medicine, studying why some tuberculosis bacteria cells respond differently to the same drug treatments. He images bacterial cells at the single-cell level and gathers information on what they look like and which genes are turned on and off.
Fitzgerald acknowledged that his work can be difficult to communicate to someone without a science background. But this summer, he learned how to explain its complexities to Vivian Gao, A28 (BFA).
“When we’re working with people in the lab or the same field, we can rely on technical jargon to facilitate communication,” Fitzgerald said. “It was super cool how Vivian approached the ideas and framed it in her own interesting way. I found it rewarding to communicate the complex ideas in a way that honors the work but also maintains a level of communicability that Vivian could abstract to a broader audience.”
Gao imagined the TB cells as robbers in a museum heist, trying to seize the lungs as their prize. To distinguish between the cells, she gave each a different pattern. The design drew inspiration from Mr. TB Germ, a character from a 1940s public health film that depicts a tuberculous bacterium as a jolly figure eager to infect people.
Fitzgerald uses fluorescence microscopy, which uses different wavelengths of light to excite different dyes and proteins in cells as a proxy for their behavior. Gao represented this technique by having the cells trip the “TB Museum” emergency alarm system, revealing wavelengths of light that identified different aspects of the TB cell population and their underlying phenotypes.
Gao and Fitzgerald worked through several iterations of the design. One early option put TB bacteria on a dance floor, with a disco ball illuminating differences between the cells. But the tone of that version felt too light for the seriousness of the illness.
“Using art to translate scientific ideas into visual language is a very exciting and interesting process,” Gao said. “The most important thing I learned was to always think very carefully before you draw. Don’t hesitate to ask any questions, because when people who know the science see this image, they will immediately know what is not accurate. After this internship, I am very interested in the field of art and STEM.”
An early concept image created by Vivian Gao for the Aldridge Lab, before the final design was chosen.
An early concept image created by Vivian Gao for the Aldridge Lab, before the final design was chosen.
An early concept image created by Vivian Gao for the Aldridge Lab, before the final design was chosen.
An early concept image created by Vivian Gao for the Aldridge Lab, before the final design was chosen.
Balancing Art and Science
Emily Pallack is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Iyer Lab, which focuses on using human stem cells to create cells specific to different regions of the spinal cord.
“The spinal cord is sort of the forgotten stepsibling of the brain,” Pallack said. “We’re trying to use these cells down the line for therapeutics, or to study pain, or to make more accurate models of neurodegenerative disease. We really want to get specific in where the cells that we’re making are coming from, which requires balancing the factors we use on them very carefully.”
Jimmy Yu, A27, A27 (BFA) worked with the Iyer Lab on one of their two collaborations during the internship. With Pallack, Yu developed a concept featuring a stem cell riding a unicycle over a spinal cord-shaped rope while a crowd watches on.
“I think for a lot of artists, not knowing the science would make it very challenging to visualize and internalize the knowledge,” Yu said. “Looking at the illustration from the scientists’ shoes really gave me a new perspective. I have to think of it artistically, while also understanding the client’s demands. There’s a very professional aspect to this collaboration that has helped me grow as an artist.”
Pallack said the learning went both ways. Yu taught the Iyer lab about composition and color theory—and that creating great art is a science of its own.
Jimmy Yu sketched multiple angles of their drawing of a cell riding a unicycle on a tight rope for the Iyer Lab.
An early concept sketch by Jimmy Yu for the Iyer Lab.
The Next Experiment
This fall and spring, the internship will become a class, Editorial Illustration in STEM, giving students 13 weeks to work on three projects from research labs in Biomedical Engineering and expanding to other STEM departments at Tufts.
Iyer said the summer pilot allowed the team to work out the kinks. Longer term, she hopes to understand how the collaboration affects scientists’ communication skills.
For the art students, the payoff could be especially tangible. “If their piece gets published, then the student will have that in their portfolio,” Zakari said. “It’s a really great way to transition out of school into the job market.”
Beyond those practical benefits, Iyer sees the collaboration as a natural extension of Tufts’ interdisciplinary environment, which brings accomplished artists into close proximity with ambitious research.
Vivian Gao also worked with the Black Lab to create an illustration that symbolizes the dynamic interaction between the extracellular matrix and fibroblasts during cardiac wound healing. Illustration: Courtesy of Vivian Gao
