July 17, 2012

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Introduction to NanoLab

By Christina Agapakis

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

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Today was the first day of the UCLA Art|ScienceNanoLab, a two-week program for high school students at the intersection of art and science. The students are required to blog every day about something that inspires them, so I'm going to try my best to keep up with them. Today was about introductions, getting to know each other and the course, and the other instructors and I all got to share some of our work and to talk about how we combine art and science in our practice. Some of the instructors are trained in art and some in science, but all connect the two in their work in fascinating ways, from Hackteria--Open Source Biological Art to animal-inspired fashion. An interesting video by one of our instructors, Megan Daalder, tells the story about how one of her art projects morphed into an investigation into the psychology and neuroscience of empathy:

I'm really excited to spend the next couple of weeks immersed in this in-between and back and forth world of art and science, and I can't wait to get to know the students better and to see the projects that they come up with!

Christina Agapakis is a biologist, designer, and writer with an ecological and evolutionary approach to synthetic biology and biological engineering. Her PhD thesis projects at the Harvard Medical School include design of metabolic pathways in bacteria for hydrogen fuel production, personalized genetic engineering of plants, engineered photosynthetic endosymbiosis, and cheese smell-omics. With Oscillator and Icosahedron Labs she works towards envisioning the future of biological technologies and synthetic biology design.

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