Felice Frankel

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Felice Frankel
Felice Frankel, 2004.jpg
Felice Frankel, 2004
Born
Brooklyn, New York, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma materBrooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY)
Known forPhotographs of scientific and engineering subjects
AwardsFellow of AAAS
Guggenheim Fellow
Lennart Nilsson Award for Scientific Photography
Loeb Fellow
Distinguished Alumna, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Progress Medal of the Photographic Society of America
Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the
Arts and Sciences at the University of California
Scientific career
FieldsScience and engineering photography
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard University

Felice Frankel is a photographer of scientific images who has received multiple awards, both for the aesthetic quality of her science photographs and for her ability to effectively communicate complex scientific information in images.[1]

Early life and education[]

Born in Brooklyn, Felice Frankel attended Midwood High School and then Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she majored in biology. She became an architectural photographer.[2]:xii

Career redirection[]

In 1991–1992, she was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Unlike many of her visual design colleagues, she decided to return to her scientific roots, auditing a class in chemistry taught by professor George M. Whitesides. Working with one of his postdocs, Nick Abbott, they collaboratively produced a striking image that was selected for the cover of the professional journal Science. Impressed with her work, Whitesides advised her, "Stay with this, Felice, you are doing something that no one else is doing."[2]:xii

This launched her into a new career working in alternation at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as funding and interesting work became available. As of 2019, she has spent more time at MIT, working at a number of departments and labs. She has observed, "That's the thing about MIT. If you have something to offer, even without formal credentials (I don't have a graduate degree), MIT will support you."[2]:xii

Career[]

Frankel's photo of ferrofluid (2002)
External video
video icon No Small Matter, Felice Frankel, PRI, Studio 360 video, September 9, 2010
video icon More than Pretty Pictures Felice Frankel, PRI, TEDx Boston video, October 13, 2010
video icon Reimagining Nanotechnology, Felice Frankel, PBS News Hour video, March 9, 2010
video icon How to communicate science visually, Felice Frankel, MIT News video, October 26, 2012

As of 2019, Felice Frankel is a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT with support from Mechanical Engineering. She has also been a senior research fellow in the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Medical School Department of Systems Biology.

Her most recent book, Picturing Science and Engineering (MIT Press, 2018) is based on her edX course, “Making Science and Engineering Pictures, A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work (0.111x)”.[3]

Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Frankel's images have been published in a number of professional journal articles, magazine covers, and various other international publications for general audiences such as National Geographic, Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and New Scientist, among others. In 2003–2007 she contributed a series of columns, Sightings, in American Scientist addressing the power of imaging science.[4][5][6]

Frankel and her work have been profiled in The New York Times, Wired, Life Magazine, The Boston Globe,[7][8] The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Science Friday,[9] The Christian Science Monitor, and various European publications. Her limited-edition photographs are included in a number of corporate and private collections,[10] and were part of MOMA’s 2008 exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind.[11] Her work was featured in the 2016 MIT Museum exhibition Images of Discovery: Communicating Science through Photography.[12]

Frankel founded the "Image and Meaning" workshops and conferences to develop new approaches for promoting the public understanding of science through visual expression. She also was principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded program "Picturing to Learn", an effort to study how making representations aids students in teaching and learning.[13]

Image integrity[]

Frankel is a strong advocate of image integrity for scientific and documentary photographic images. She also recommends appropriate use of image adjustment and enhancement techniques such as color enhancement, grayscale inversion, or selective deletion of distracting or irrelevant elements, as well as more subtle manipulations of image histograms, all in service of goals such as clarity of communication.[2]:315–339

However, she insists that all image manipulation must be fully disclosed, to avoid misleading the reader regarding the integrity of the scientific images. In her 2018 book, Frankel has reprinted the journal publication guidelines of Nature, Science, and Cell, comparing the extensively detailed directives of the first journal with the minimal guidance given in the latter two publications as of her book's publication deadline.[2]:340–343

Awards and honors[]

Books[]

  • Picturing Science and Engineering. MIT Press. 2018. ISBN 978-0262038553.
  • Visual Strategies : A practical guide to graphics for scientists & engineers. Yale University Press. 2012. ISBN 978-0300176445.
  • No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale. Harvard University Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0674035669.</ref>
  • On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science. Harvard University Press. 2008. ISBN 978-0674026889.
  • Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image. MIT Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0262562058.
  • Modern Landscape Architecture: Redefining the Garden. Abbeville Press. 1991. ISBN 978-1558590236.

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ "She calls it 'phenomena.' Everyone else calls it art". New York Times. 12 June 2007. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Frankel, Felice (2018). Picturing science and engineering. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262038553.
  3. ^ "Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work". edx.org. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  4. ^ "Felice Frankel - American Scientist". americanscientist.org. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  5. ^ "Selected Covers – Felice Frankel". felicefrankel.com. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  6. ^ "Selected Publications - Felice Frankel". felicefrankel.com. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  7. ^ "Photographer has front-row seat for big scientific discoveries". Boston Globe. June 10, 2015. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  8. ^ "At MIT, seeing is learning as well as believing". Boston Globe. March 27, 2015. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  9. ^ "Picture of the Week: Ferrofluid". National Public Radio, Science Friday. June 15, 2015. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  10. ^ "Images in Place – Felice Frankel". Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  11. ^ "Design and the Elastic Mind" (PDF). moma.org. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  12. ^ "Images of Discovery". Mit.edu. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  13. ^ "Picturing to learn". Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  14. ^ "Novelist Sapphire and CNN anchor Don Lemon to speak at commencement". cuny.edu. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  15. ^ "Felice Frankel receives highest award granted by Photographic Society of America". news.harvard.edu. 2009-12-21. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  16. ^ "Frankel wins Lennart Nilsson Award" B. D. Colen, Harvard News Office, October 17, 2007

External links[]

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