Fine Art nominee

In this series I reflect upon the adaptive changes made by birds and humans 65 million years after the K/T mass extinction event. Birds are the only dinosaurs to have survived the K/T extinction, which opened an ecological niche for mammals and the eventual rise of humans. Both birds and mammal exhibited explosions in their diversity after the K/T event, in part, due to their intellectual capacity, adaptability, and problem solving skills.

Neuroscientists play an integral part in culture but the public knows little about how science is done, who does it or why it’s important. One consequence of opaque scientific work is the inability to see which individuals are conducting their research, their personal stories, and their motivations to help reveal the complexity of the nature we are imbued by.

These images were captured with a compact large format camera using experimental New55 PN instant film. The opaqueness of the positive (left) represents the raw data collected by scientists on their quest to understand nature. The inverted negative (right) represents how scientists reveal nature through filtering data, beautifying imagery, and at times removing unwanted, but captured information.

All scientists are part of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.