Resources
Picturing Science and Engineering
Explore the many additional resources curated by author Felice Frankel and the MIT Press.
On this page you will find links to tutorials, tools, author interviews, and articles that accompany and enhance this unique guide for creating science images that are both accurate and visually stunning.
Course Tutorials | Interactive Tools | How To Do It | Articles from American Scientist | Interviews | Bibliography | Selected Videos | Selected MIT Spotlights
Course Tutorials
From MIT OCW RES.10.001 Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work. Spring 2016. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu.
- Video 1: Using a Flatbed Scanner
- Video 2: Placing Objects on the Scanner
- Video 3: Transmitted and Reflected Light
- Video 4: Enhancing the Scanned Image
- Video 5: Camera and Lens
- Video 6: Setting the Exposure
- Video 7: Aperture
- Video 8: Composition
- Video 9: Backgrounds
- Video 10: Point of View
- Video 11: An Introduction
- Video 12: Fluorescence
- Video 13: Use Your Imagination
- Video 14: Using a Smartphone
- Video 15: Imaging with a Tablet Camera
- Video 17: Looking at Videos
- Video 18: Designing Graphics
- Video 19: Time and Scale
- Video 20: Cover Submissions
- Video 21: Image "Enhancement"
- Video 22: Speaking to the Public
- Video 23: Liquid Battery
- Video 24: Fuel Cells for Mobile Batteries
- Video 25: A Solar Thermophotovoltaic (STPV) System
- Video 26: Microneedles
- Video 27: Soft Lithography
- Video 28: Chemical Vapor Deposition
- Video 29: Analytical Microreactor
- Video 30 Stretchable Sensors
- Video 31: Solar Cell
Interactive Tools
MIT Open Courseware offered a set of interactive tools related to the course, Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work.
- Interactive A: Aperture Settings
- Interactive B: Compare F-Stops
- Interactive C: Fill Light
- Interactive D1: Lighting Gallery
- Interactive D2: Lighting Comparison
How-To-Do-It
From MIT OCW RES.10.001 Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work. Spring 2016. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu.
Sharpen an Image | Digitally Replace a Background | Convert an Image from Horizontal to Vertical |
Set Your Scanner | Fix Mobile Distortion |
Articles from American Scientist
Felice Frankel authored this series of "Sightings" articles for the magazine American Scientist. The topics of each article are listed below.
(Courtesy of American Scientist. Used with permission.)
2003 | |
May-June (PDF): Images in science as powerful tools for communication | |
July-August (PDF): Sid Nagel, University of Chicago | |
September-October (PDF): David Kaiser, professor in MIT's Science, Technology, and Society program and a lecturer in phsyics, discusses Richard Feynman's diagrams. | |
November-December (PDF): Oscar Miller, Professor Emeritus in biology at the University of Virginia | |
2004 | |
January-February (PDF): Eric J. Heller, professor of physics and chemistry at Harvard University and his landscape photography | |
March-April (PDF): Ben Fry, doctoral candidate in the Media Laboratory at MIT on visualizing large quantities of data | |
May-June (PDF): Michael Berry, Royal Society research professor in the physics department at the University of Bristol in the U.K. | |
July-August (PDF): John Bush, associate professor of applied mathematics at MIT | |
September-October (PDF): Jeff Hester, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Arizona State University, discusses an image of stars being birthed in the Eagle Nebula, taken by the Hubble Telescope. | |
November-December (PDF): First-place illustration from Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge contest | |
2005 | |
January-February (PDF): Frank O'Connell, "How It Works" feature in The New York Times | |
March-April (PDF): Maria Eisner, research scientist at Cornell University | |
May-June (PDF): Don Eigler and Dominique Brodbeck from IBM discussing the image of "orange and blue quantum corrals" | |
July-August (PDF): David Goodsell, research scientist at the Scripps Research Institute | |
September-October (PDF): Donna Cox, professor and director of visualization and experimental technologies at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | |
November-December (PDF): Chris Hardee, VP of marketing at Omega Optical who created the winning image from the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge | |
2006 | |
January-February (PDF): Michael Cohen, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and John Hart, graduate student in mechanical engineering at MIT | |
March-April (PDF): Viktor Koen, Parsons School of Design | |
May-June (PDF): Danielle Cork France, graduate student in biological engineering at MIT | |
July-August (PDF); Alyssa Goodman, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and director of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing | |
September-October (PDF): Ron Perry of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and Sarah Frisken at Tufts University | |
November-December (PDF): W. Paul Brown of the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center, and creator of the winning image from the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge | |
2007 | |
January-February (PDF): Analyzing and visualizing gene expression during development | |
March-April (PDF): Robert Lue, directs life sciences education at Harvard University | |
May-June (PDF): Richard J. Massey and Lars Lindberg Christensen and astronomy's first maps of the "dark matter" of the cosmos | |
September-October 1 (PDF): Andrea Ottesen, doctoral candidate in the Department of Plant Sciences and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland, and the year's winner of the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge | |
September-October 2 (PDF): Graphic designer Jessica Helfand discusses volvelles, types of slide charts constructed with rotating parts | |
2008 | |
January-February (PDF): Jeff W. Lichtman, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University and Jean Livet, a postdoctoral fellow in his lab discuss a new technique for "labeling" neurons | |
Interviews
- Conversation with Kelly Krause, Creative Director for Nature
- Conversation with Brian Hayes, Writer and Photographer - audio only
- Conversation with Christine Daniloff, Creative Director at MIT News - audio only
- Conversation with J. Kim Vandiver, Director of the MIT Edgerton Center - audio only
Bibliography
A short bibliography supplied by the author.
Selected Videos
Some videos for inspiration.
Below you will find a selected short list of exemplary videos. I plan to add to the list as time goes by. Please feel free to contact Felice Frankel if you think I should add a particular video to this list.
From MIT OpenCourseWare
From the Beauty of Science
- https://www.beautyofscience.com/chemistry various
- https://www.beautyofscience.com/tiffany
- https://www.beautyofscience.com/golden-pin-design-award
From the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, https://www.beautyofscience.com/
- Acoustophoretic Printing
- MORPH: A new soft material microfabrication process
- HAMR: Robotic Cockroach for Underwater Explorations
- Hybrid 3D Printing of Soft Electronics
From the MIT Media Lab
Selected MIT Spotlights
January 2018 | March 2018 | March 2017 |
May 2017 | July 2017 | October 2017 |
January 2016 | June 2016 | August 2016 |
October 2016 | June 2015 | September 2014 |
We would like to acknowledge the encouragement and indispensable advice we have received from the staff of the MIT Museum and the MIT Libraries, especially David Nunez, Cody Oliver, and Carl Jones. We thank the Museum for hosting the interactive images served on this page.
Publication of Picturing Science and Engineering was made possible by the generous support of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.