About Me

 

Bio

I am an artist-scientist with a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology (Harvard), post-doctoral training in neurobiology (Harvard Medical School), and experience as a scientific journal editor (Cell). I have been making art full-time since 2017.

My interest in transforming three-dimensional forms and sensory perception has been foundational for both my scientific and artistic practices. I live and work in Boston.

Statement

Drawing from my many years of experience as a biologist, I like to experiment with materials and techniques. Just as my scientific research focused on morphogenesis (how complex shapes and structures are formed), my artwork uses materiality and transforming spatial forms to explore intermediate states or inflection points of processes that are in flux. My work dwells in these in-between spaces, where both tension and possibility reside, to render visible what is unseen or unscrutinized and to imagine alternative trajectories. 

 

Conceptual frameworks


This energy landscape diagram of protein folding depicts the many intermediate states that proteins may go through while being folded into their final 3D structure. There are some intermediate states that lead to dysfunction (dark gray). But "chaperones" may reverse these trajectories by nudging proteins into different intermediate states (light gray). 

 


Theoretical epigenetic landscape diagrams by biologist Conrad Hal Waddington (1905 - 1975). These diagrams imagined how embryonic development unfolds over time, with a cell starting as a ball at the top of a hill, with many potential routes through a series of ridges and valleys, with multiple decision or "inflection" points, finally ending with the cell in a highly specific, differentiated state -- one of many possible "fates" (A). Recent stem cell studies have shown that de-differentiation, or reversion to an "earlier" and less determined state, is possible through a process known as reprogramming (B). Direct conversion into a different cell type without de-differentiation is also possible through a process known as transdifferentiation (C). 

The processes illustrated in B and C are, in a sense, like pressing reset -- like going back in time without going back in time. They are deliberate interventions that subvert the established course of events.


CV

 

Using Format