We have Sarah Adkins-Jablonsky with us today. You may be familiar with some of her Uyghur art. She's a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and an NSF graduate research fellow. She's done fantastic work at the interface of biology, art education, and science outreach. Sarah, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me. How did you get interested in the intersection of biology and the arts? Usually, we think of these as being two very different things. How did you get interested in the start making connections between the two? You see that's a great question. I started off in university at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as a chemistry major. Realized that wasn't for me because I didn't really like reactions or the [inaudible] reactions, I felt difficult. I switched to biology and just in general, my chemistry and my biology courses were really sterile. I felt like I wasn't really appreciating the beauty of life or researches. I would come to know it. All the while I was getting really frustrated with a lot of the courses I was taking, like biochemistry and a range of biology courses, or we're just learning out of a textbook. It's very boring to me, very sterile. All the while I was thinking about, well, I had this interest in photography and I had to take a prerequisite course to start taking photography courses, which in my case was an introduction to design course I had to take and in that classroom, Doug Baulos, a teacher at UAB, whom I still very much admire, was like everyone in this room can grow up to be a professional artist. Everyone can go on through their art career and that really motivated me because in my science courses I wasn't hearing that. I was hearing teachers saying like, "Well like 30 percent of you are going to fail," like blah like you're not all going to become doctors, almost like condescending. But in art classes, it seemed like my perspective and my experience was valued even though I had no real formal art experience. That's how I got interested in art in general. Even though I didn't really come from that background, they were just teachers in those courses that were like your experience and what you're able to do and what we can teach you in this course really matter to culture into society. Throughout my art career, I was really interested, took a lot of ceramics courses, and through some other courses like performance art, I was trying to push the boundary of what I thought are at least at our institution could be. Really admired performance art, which is where people use art with their bodies. They themselves are the artwork in a pseudo theatrical production. But even at our university at that time, performance art really wasn't much of a thing. It was really hard for me to define where I wanted to take my artwork even though I was simultaneously working towards a biology degree and eventually ended up in a biology research lab. That's where I ended my undergraduate career, passionate about a lot of the artwork. I was making hand ceramics. A lot of my artworks tended to be about my experiences, but also biology, and I'd make a lot of ceramic red blood cells. These ideas were resonating with me even though they weren't quite polished. You talked about comic books and I think you'll talk more about that in your following episode. But something that actually got me into my research lab, my senior year of college, was taking microbiology with Dr. Jeff Morris at UAB and for our final project, it was a ten-page paper. Some very long paper that I certainly didn't want to write and so instead of turning in a final research paper to him, I turned in a little graphic novel of a comic book on that topic and I was very scared to turn it in, it seemed like something out of a movie. I remember shaking when I turned it in like is this even going to work? I'm going to fail this course? But luckily, I didn't fail and because of that, he welcomed me into his research lab, which was amazing and I'm thankful for that moment ever since. I joined the research labs still with a growing frustration of all of the science courses that I had taken and around that time was when the American Society for Microbiology Uyghur art contests, so it's around 2014-2015 where that started becoming more popular and got off the ground. I imagine that Uyghur art itself could open up doors to student discovery and I started making my own Uyghur art and that's really when I started playing with this idea that the Uyghur art could be used as more than just an artwork. It can be used as a form of scientific inquiry. It can really help smooth over some of those frustrations that I was feeling as a student when I wasn't doing authentic science when I was doing great disciplinary based lecture-based courses that didn't really suit me or suit how I wanted to learn and so I got into the intersection of biology and arts really with frustration with how science had been taught and thinking like how can art be taught in science courses that really helps push science forward? Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Is that some of your Uyghur art and your background behind you? Yeah, I wanted to show something recently I did, exist as an example of a lot of things you can do with Uyghur art is more than just submit it to this contest or even use it as science. There's a local Kambucho place in Birmingham called Harvest Roots Ferments. I've been working with them to try to figure out how to make designs that of the microbes that grow in their Kambucho and plate them on dishes that show their logos. That's such a neat idea. Then Sarah also did the headline for our course as well. But what is your favorite example of where biology and the arts have connected in some synergistic way? I love agar art. I really enjoy. Selfishly, this is something that I'm really invested in getting students to make paintings with microbes. I can think about agar contextualized in this broader field of art called BioArt. I've studied the more famous artists like Eduardo Kac, ORLAN. There's a lot of famous BioArtists, I think, in terms of the fine art world that I really like. But something that I was growing frustrated with is, they're really couched in the fine art world or some types of agar art and BioArt. They don't really seem to give back to scientific discovery. Something that I've learned more about in the past few years are these DIY, do it yourself for public spaces, like [inaudible] Academy and BioArt Labs, which are in the Netherlands. I've had the very unique opportunity to learn more about what they do, these are like incubator spaces for the public to come in and do things like agar art, and these types of really bio-design or BioArt, science art-related tools that really push scientific inquiry in those spaces forward. Because of that, I've also been introduced to things like the Bio Summit, which is this huge collaboration of people who work together at the intersection of design, engineering, art, and science to create solutions to more broad problems than I ever thought was possible. They're thinking about climate change, how can science and art help climate change, help sustainability, help really inform people about really big issues. I know there's also an organization I just learned more about called Biodesign, which is I think, in that same vein, trying to get students. Biodesign is that multiple universities and high schools across the globe trying to get students working on their own projects at the intersection of art and science to push some of these ideas forward in a way that's not just, we're going to hang up this agar art in an exhibition space. But really, just going to use these types of tools to move forward in scientific inquiry. There's also things like Amino Labs, if you've heard of that, which like a DIY kit so you can purchase online. They're relatively inexpensive. I think I got one kit for 30 or $40. It comes with an incubator and tools to do agar art. I think things like that are really valuable. Also, I really like the GIANTmicrobes company. I have one too. I love it. Where biology and art intersect to this science art world is just so much bigger than I had ever imagined. It's really hard for me to come up with just one example of something I really like. But really, when biology and arts are in the hands of students, I think that's something that I most value. Then the hands of people who wouldn't normally think that those two things would go together. Absolutely. Something we've talked about in this module is how it's such an important bridge between the two. You published a quasi-experimental study in 2017 on using agar art and microbiology labs. Would you mind telling us a little bit about the study and any follow-up work you've done since? Sure. Yes. When I started graduate school, I worked to co-create this curriculum called The Art of Microbiology, which enhances really a semester long introductory microbiology course. It can be used at universities. We've also used them at community colleges, which uses agar art. Students isolate soil bacteria from their community, so just dirt around where they are, and use biochemical tests, like you often do in your microbiology lab course. But also genetic tests, like 16S sequencing to identify their isolates throughout the semester. While that's happening, they also create agar art, like some of the work that you see behind me, like I was talking about that I've made from [inaudible]. They make these types of agar art which blossom in unexpected ways. This sheds novel insights about the isolates that they're working with. In the second half of the semester, they get to create their own hypothesis based on these agar artworks. They carry out their types of experimentation, guided of course, by the TAs and professors, resulting in new data that could be of interest to the professor, and other collaborators. It's been modulated for outreach activities for 1-3 days sets of exercises. In terms of what we did in that, my first attempt at educational research, I knew that I wanted to create this curriculum but I wanted evidence really to show that it was working. We asked students a series of questions who took this course and who took the course before it transitioned before the agar art was a part of the course. We asked them questions that have indicated students persistence in the sciences. We showed that students in art course verse the comparable control group the year prior had at the end of their semester, more associated feelings about their persistence in the sciences. Some of the students whom we interviewed specifically indicated that it was things that they did in this course that made them feel that way because they were designing their own hypotheses. As on aside, it seemed they really liked the agar art activity. It was fun and novel. But that was only post-to-post testing, and as I said, it was really the first time that I was trying to figure out how to properly assess student results in a class like this. If we're really going to promote this curriculum, we want to show that it works. I recently submitted a paper that talks about a two-year study we did where we compare pre, and post results across both university, and at the community college where students are doing this curriculum, and something that I was really interested in the follow-up study. In addition to really pinpointing how student attitudes change from pre to post, was figuring out what part of the curriculum was it that students were getting the most out of. We use something called the aspect survey, it's popular discipline-based education researcher. Biology education researchers use it to really map out what students are thinking about particular activities. I think about this curriculum having really three big activities that might aid in student success, one being the. Auger art, one being designing the experiment and the hypothesis, and the last one, when they present their results to the classmate. We know that scientific communication in that way is really helpful to students' identity as scientists. By large, we found that students really resonated with the poster presentations, and some of the auger art itself. They thought when they talked about how fun it was, they talked about they would recommend these types of activities to future classes. We've found that students really didn't like designing their own experiments as much, but of course, student outcomes are much more than what they're actually like. We did in fact see student changes in the nature of science, so that's not to say that we shouldn't include experimentation. But when we're thinking about poster presentations, and auger art fun activities, they're really important contributions to the curriculum itself that students have a lot of value in. That's most of the work I've done assessing this curriculum. I think at this point I can say that it works. I want to be done assessing it. But really I want this curriculum to hopefully outlive me with more professors at different universities have started using it, but really I'm just thrilled when more teachers are using inquiry-based, but even sometimes humanities-based, or auger art activities in particular in their classrooms. We've shown that students love it, it's really fun, and it helps them develop their own experiments. You'd really encourage people who are taking this course to try, and design outreach activities to really think about how to bring the humanities then as part of these activities because it has these great science outcomes too. Yeah, definitely. In your 2017 paper you talked about the human element. How important the human element is for creating a scientific image? That's really at the heart of being an effective science communicator. Why do you think that human element works? That's a great question. I think that works for the same reason that student newspapers want to show pictures of students, and those papers actually get more traction than the ones that don't show pictures of students. That's just a reference point because I used to work in a student newspaper. People want to be seen, and they want to be related to connecting with your viewers, or your readership is critical for maintaining your relationship, not just between the creation and the consumer, but the creator creation and the consumer. We really resonate with infographics that have pictures of people, or that ask questions related to our own experiences. Without that personal connection, it just goes back to the same things that really frustrated with me about how science has been traditionally taught. It's just here are the facts, it doesn't connect to you, it's just this is the way the world is. But I really want to bridge that gap between what is science, and how can it impact society, and human lives? Why is it important that we're teaching students in this way? Because it has more value to them, and that's something I'm very interested in. Yeah. That's a wonderful point about it. It helps connect us as humans together, and that's why it makes it so much more accessible. Why it's such a good bridge, that's an excellent, excellent point. Finally, students who are taking this course, and in this module in particularly, if they want to use art as a form of engaging with the general public, or with students that are coming maybe to a museum to do an activity, and they aren't sure where to start, what would you recommend that they do? This is a really great question. There's someone in my committee who's really emphasize to me, and Dr. Stacey Gruger had agreed that science communication, if that's their end goal, there is no one specific general public. It's really important to understand who is your public? Who is the targeted community that you're trying to talk to? That's something that I would identify first with. For me, it's very particular pockets of people in university, it's pre-med students, but it's also the fine art community because as a professional artist with a studio, that's also a circle that I inhabit. I just know in advance that when I'm trying to reach out to people, it's probably a science undergraduate at my university, or at other universities, or it's fine art communities, usually urban fine art communities. It's not exclusive to that, but identifying who is your very specific target audience. Sometimes you can think wider than that. You can think, all the people who follow me on Twitter or all the people who follow me on Instagram, and I'm trying to grow that to more of a global audience. But identifying who those people are first will help you understand exactly what you need to do to reach out to them. Something that I would just recommend in general, and that's helped me tremendously, even though I still feel like I'm almost an infant at it, is using social media because it is absolutely free, using a lot of hashtags, reaching out to people through LinkedIn, email, Twitter, and conference networks, if that's something that's available to you, is really important in reaching out to the communities that you're trying to reach out to. I've had a lot of collaborators now who have just reached out to me using ResearchGate or LinkedIn that I wouldn't have known about if they didn't just cold email me. Likewise, I've done that with a lot of people too; a lot of people that I admire. For instance, Dr. Hunter Cole; I think she's still in Chicago. I was visiting some family there and I really wanted to meet her. She's someone in bio art that I really look up to. I just emailed her and I was like, "I'm in the area, can we please meet?" I'm glad she wasn't like, who are you? So I think being comfortable with cold emailing, but also just reaching out to people through social media and using social media as a way to advertise what it is you're trying to do, and the work that you have so far is really important. Just for me, because the fine art community is a community that I tried to reach out to with my science artwork, is to apply to as many local and national art shows as you possibly can. I'm in more Facebook and Twitter groups than I can possibly count that just advertise these opportunities. Usually, the fees are relatively cheap. I just applied to one that was free; maybe they go up to $25. But the more that you're inhabiting the circles that you're trying to inhabit and talking to the people you want to talk to, those things will help you engage with the audience that you're trying to do. I think in summary, identifying your audience using social media and free networking online, finding the people that you look up to and asking them, how did you do this, how did you get involved, how did you get to the stage that you're at, and then really applying for as many things as you can possibly apply for would be my general, but also very personal advice. Yeah. Excellent. Knowing your audience is a theme we've talked a lot about in this course, and how important it is to tailor your message for your audience, and what their needs are. I think your point about reaching out to the art community is also really important too. I guess another thing we've talked quite a bit about in this course is about how much of science communication, science outreach is just preaching to the choir so to speak, where the people who are coming to our big exciting outdoor event that we're having or reading our articles, are the people who already like science a lot. I think it's really important to be able to tap in their communities to help those people bridge that gap as well. It's interesting, we learned about Santiago Ramon Y Cajal and his neurons, and his drawings of neurons are in neuroscience textbooks today, and they're in art exhibitions around the world. That's amazing. That's definitely something I would think to do. Some other work I have done is introducing small interventions in non-majors courses, and to me that really helps me figure out, even though non-majors just represent a very small demographic, there's still people who maybe don't have an innate interest in science. But of course, I'm just speaking it from an academic standpoint. But if I can explain what I'm trying to do to both non-majors and majors, I would feel more comfortable going out to more public spaces. But something that I've come across in a lot of the talks that I've given in our graduate school, they recommend that we give these public talks at pubs or bars, and while it has been really cool to see my parents learn about what I do in a more simple way, most of the audience, they're just scientists. So I think being able to think about exactly what you're saying, being able to think about what you're doing both in terms of the science and the art, beyond just the science academy, is really to the general public's benefit. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm glad you brought up the point about non-science majors. There's a lot of non-science majors who had an interest in science, but they're turned off to it because they've had some bad experience. With that, I want to thank you again so much for coming out today. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. This has been very delightful. I've quite enjoyed your book. There's so many topics in it that I've really learned a lot from. Something that I didn't even talk about is, just as you were saying, how much science really depends on art. In my very specific example, we're having students create artwork which informs their own discoveries. But really the entire canon of scientific discovery wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for artistry and imaging to begin with. Yeah, it's true. Really they're not as a separate as I thought when I started college. They're very overlapping disciplines that depend heavily on one another. Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you again. Okay. Thanks. Bye.
