This past week the lab did something a bit different for lab meeting: we talked about and shared our science (and not-so-science related) art. All possible art mediums were encouraged for submission (baking, poetry, music, paintings, photographs, etc). The following slides contain the submitted art work shared at our lab meeting.
The following are descriptions of each artist’s work:
Alex Alexiev: These photographs of unidentified fungi were taken at Muir Woods National Monument in the Bay Area of California. The forest is constituted by redwoods, ferns, and small waterfalls. The high humidity creates a great habitat for various awesome fungi and molds to flourish.
Marisano James: The poem was written by Marisano when he was 19 years old and only recently mailed to him by a friend. The photographs he submitted included two dragon flies in the middle of a mating ritual, an intricately painted mailbox, a photograph of the UC Davis graduation, a dragonfly close-up and a silk moth emerging from its cocoon.
Katie Dahlhausen: These are pictures of mushroom spores taken on a scanning electron microscope that Katie built herself!
Madison Dunitz: These are images of a microbe an undergraduate student in the lab, Andrew Stump, is characterizing.
Ruth Lee: Ruth painted the two acrylic paintings and made the collage during her senior year of high school. The snow leopard was painted for a friend who had red-green color blindness. She wanted to give him something that looked the same to him as it would for everyone else. It was the first painting she ever did. The landscape painting was also a done for a friend and was the production of just her mind (no photo reference was used!). Her friend’s favorite movie was Disney’s Pocahontas, and this is her rendition of the waterfall scene. The prompt for the collage was how she thought the world should be changed and back then, Ruth thought that the best way to change the world would be to educate future generations about adopting an active approach towards the issues of today.
Hannah Holland-Moritz: Hannah enjoys amateur photography and is interested in the intersection of science photography and art. The majority of these photographs were taken on various hikes in Northern California. The microscope photo was from one of the first microbiology experiments she ever performed. It’s a biofilm stained for polysaccharides and bacterial DNA.
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
I’ve never heard of using lab meetings in such a creative way. What do you think you and the other lab members got out of the experience?
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I think that the art show lab meeting served three main purposes. The first being that it allowed us to get to know our fellow lab members on a more personal level and fostered a spirit of openness and bonding between lab members. The second purpose was that it helped promote creativity and thus creative thinking which is important when thinking about scientific approaches, potential experiments and data analysis. The last purpose was that it reinforced the idea that it is important to take a break from science every once in a while; a reminder that your life outside of science is important too.
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This is a really great, comprehensive answer. Personally, I definitely noticed the last point most. I used to draw and do a lot of art before college, but ever since, I’ve put it all on the back-burner for the sake of getting through undergrad. I definitely regret it, and this lab meeting made me really want to go back to doing art regularly!
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