I posted this to twitter yesterday but am now adding it to my blog since it was so great. At the Synthetic Biology 5.0 meeting at Stanford I walked into the poster session last night to discover this incredible poster:
Karmella Haynes, had hand painted her poster on canvas. Drawn in by the art, I went to talk to her (well, first I said “This is awesome” or something like that. And then I found out a bit more detail. She had her paints with her and was continuing to add touches to the painting. Though I was fascinated by the art side of this, then we got to talking about the science because actually – the figures there were about work she had done on applying some ideas from synthetic biology to animal cells in tissue culture.
I was completely blown away by this. I am not sure if the same posters will be up tomorrow and if so I will try to get some better shots. Anyway, I found out she is on her way to a faculty position in Arizona and has recently been a post doctoral fellow at Davidson College.
And then with a little help from Google I discovered her openwetware page: Karmella Haynes. And from that I found her art page: http://www.karmellahaynes.com/. I hope she does more hand painted posters for conferences – it certainly brightened up the poster session and made my day.
A nice reminder that art goes hand in hand with science – art is really important for the analysis and synthesis of ideas.
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