Medical/Scientific Art
I am an animation master's student with a bachelor's in biology. As a result, creating art that allows me to combine these two interests is my ideal.
3/21 presentation
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2/7 presentation
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My most recent project is a picture book about a chinchilla with epilepsy and autism, both of which often occur together. I want to give children with these conditions a story they can relate to and children without a story they can learn from. Empathy remains my main goal.
One thing that is important to me is depicting the sides of these conditions that don't tend to appear in the media. Most people imagine seizures as tonic-clonic/grand mal, but focal seizures, as my main character has, are significantly more common. Similarly, autism in the media tends to be high-functioning to savant-level depictions, while my main character will experience some degree of intellectual disability. It is very important to me that I treat these conditions with care and understanding. My main character does not wish she was "normal," but seeks to teach her audience through story about why her conditions are not so scary.
More updates to come!
One thing that is important to me is depicting the sides of these conditions that don't tend to appear in the media. Most people imagine seizures as tonic-clonic/grand mal, but focal seizures, as my main character has, are significantly more common. Similarly, autism in the media tends to be high-functioning to savant-level depictions, while my main character will experience some degree of intellectual disability. It is very important to me that I treat these conditions with care and understanding. My main character does not wish she was "normal," but seeks to teach her audience through story about why her conditions are not so scary.
More updates to come!
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I spent some time working for BTEC at NC State as an intern. My job was to model and animate the bioreactor for a video game-type experience to teach students how to use the technology. To the left, you can see a turnaround of the bioreactor model. To the right, the screens I recreated in Illustrator so that the game (created in Unity) can be as accurate as possible.
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I wanted to build off of my StarAR app (seen below) with something a bit more accessible. I worked through a number of ideas and formats for a continuation of the app and/or a book before finally figuring out what I wanted to do.
A book that both a child and a parent can read and gain understanding through was my ideal. I decided that an entirely physical book for each participant would be best, so that there were no complications in reading and understanding what they were reading. My ideation process for this is shown below.
Stargardt disease causes visual struggles, so I wanted the maximum differentiation between layers. I also created more of a cut paper effect, because crafts are child-friendly and I thought it might make the book look more welcoming.
My plan for the future is to develop this book into a series, each explaining a different childhood disease using a different animal.
The font used is APHont by the American Printing House for the Blind, which was created specifically for readability with lower vision.
A book that both a child and a parent can read and gain understanding through was my ideal. I decided that an entirely physical book for each participant would be best, so that there were no complications in reading and understanding what they were reading. My ideation process for this is shown below.
Stargardt disease causes visual struggles, so I wanted the maximum differentiation between layers. I also created more of a cut paper effect, because crafts are child-friendly and I thought it might make the book look more welcoming.
My plan for the future is to develop this book into a series, each explaining a different childhood disease using a different animal.
The font used is APHont by the American Printing House for the Blind, which was created specifically for readability with lower vision.
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The aim of this project is to simulate the experience of having Stargardt disease. Stargardt is the most common cause of macular degeneration in adolescents. It starts by causing slowly decreasing central vision, which looks like hazy spots. This process may speed up and level off, rarely resulting in total blindness. Color perception may also be decreased over the progression of the disease, as well as light sensitivity. The content of this project with be simulating this disease progression in a qualitative way using Unity, augmented reality, and particle effects. As this will be an educational piece for members of the public who may know nothing about this disease, I plan to achieve epistemic curiosity through desire to better understand the reality behind their experience. Viewers will want to better understand the disease and have more empathy to sufferers. This curiosity will be motivated by the novel experience of actually “having” the symptoms of the disease through an augmented reality cell phone application. There also may be an element of surprise if the viewer/wearer is not expecting their vision to be affected in the way that it is.
My goal is to become a scientific/medical animator and so I have been trying to explore this concentration in my graduate work. My original idea for this project was to create a wearable technology with visual, auditory, and tactile elements to explore a kidney disease that effects all of those senses. However, time and technology constraints meant that I needed to downsize my project scope. As a result, I looked into interesting eye conditions, as visual is the medium I am most comfortable in. Stargadt disease caught my attention because it is not uncommon, but not well-known and it effects children, which makes it especially important to draw awareness to. My audience would be primarily parents, although there is potential use for occupational therapists to better help their patients. This app is intended as a very usable, accessible app so that parents could use it at home to better empathize with their children and rearrange their homes as needed.
Unity was used with Particle Pack, Playmaker, and AR Kit to create my app. Particle Pack is the free particle plugin for Unity. It had a few prefabricated particle systems, and I was able to tweak one to create a foggy effect that I felt was a good metaphor for the hazy spots caused by Stargardt disease. I then used Playmaker to animate my scene’s post-processing effects, as those effects cannot be directly keyframed themselves. Motion blur and eye adaption were kept on for the whole scene, while color grading and bloom were keyed to turn on as the associated text explained the related symptoms.
See Fall 2018 Animation Studio for notes on progress.
My goal is to become a scientific/medical animator and so I have been trying to explore this concentration in my graduate work. My original idea for this project was to create a wearable technology with visual, auditory, and tactile elements to explore a kidney disease that effects all of those senses. However, time and technology constraints meant that I needed to downsize my project scope. As a result, I looked into interesting eye conditions, as visual is the medium I am most comfortable in. Stargadt disease caught my attention because it is not uncommon, but not well-known and it effects children, which makes it especially important to draw awareness to. My audience would be primarily parents, although there is potential use for occupational therapists to better help their patients. This app is intended as a very usable, accessible app so that parents could use it at home to better empathize with their children and rearrange their homes as needed.
Unity was used with Particle Pack, Playmaker, and AR Kit to create my app. Particle Pack is the free particle plugin for Unity. It had a few prefabricated particle systems, and I was able to tweak one to create a foggy effect that I felt was a good metaphor for the hazy spots caused by Stargardt disease. I then used Playmaker to animate my scene’s post-processing effects, as those effects cannot be directly keyframed themselves. Motion blur and eye adaption were kept on for the whole scene, while color grading and bloom were keyed to turn on as the associated text explained the related symptoms.
See Fall 2018 Animation Studio for notes on progress.
I was a part of two Leading Strand projects and aided with a third, for an initiative to pair designers with researchers. My groups allowed visitors to better understand optimized cancer therapy and step into the furry shoes of a little-known aye-aye lemur. I also provided some help to a group focusing on letting people experience the mysteries of dark matter. The above video was shot by me (hence why I don't appear in it) to show some of the work we did.
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Cancer: This artistic simulation of radiotherapy for cancer treatment displayed critical aspects of geometric optimization of radiotherapy. The experience was physical so as to be more interactive and understandable in its mission to communicate complex and multifaceted challenges in mathematical optimization.
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Lemur: Percussive foraging was used to locate a grub in a log by listening to the acoustic properties that the wood returns on repeated small impacts. Tapping different locations on the log resulted in sounds of different frequencies being projected. When a grub was located, the screen displayed a video game where more percussive foraging was required to catch the grub.
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Experiment in using particle effects to create blood cells rushing through a blood vessel.
This artistic figure was created for a University of Chapel Hill Clinical Pharmacology Fellow for her dissertation submission to a scientific journal.
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One of my classes in graduate school sought to work on the problem of the lack of women in computer science. Around second grade has been found to be the time when girls really start to feel like they don't belong in the field. To that end, we visited a second grade class to try to make programming seem to appealing to students, especially the girls.
We used small, round robot called Spheros. My goal was to teach STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) skills by having students build obstacle courses to navigate their Spheros through.
We used small, round robot called Spheros. My goal was to teach STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) skills by having students build obstacle courses to navigate their Spheros through.
My undergraduate thesis sought to understand the basis of anthropomorphism, both throughout the human history of ancient oral traditions and in recent animated films by Disney and Pixar. I examined anthropomorphism through the lens of biological accuracy by measuring and comparing live animals with animals as metaphors in story and oral tradition and animals in film. I sought to determine why humans desire anthropomorphism, and why we resultantly find animals so attractive. My goal was to understand anthropomorphism, so that I better understood the benefits—and limits—of anthropomorphism in my own animation.