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RES.10-001 | Spring 2026 | Undergraduate

# Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work

### Books

Frankel, Felice C. Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image. MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780262562058. [Preview with Google Books]

———. The Visual Elements—Photography: A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering. The University of Chicago Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780226827025.

———. The Visual Elements—Design A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering. The University of Chicago Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780226829166.

———. Sguardi Sulla Scienza / Visions of Science. Edizioni Olivares, 2005. ISBN: 9788885982925.

Frankel, Felice C., and Angela H. DePace. Visual Strategies: A Practical Guide to Graphics for Scientists and Engineers. Yale University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780300176445.

Frankel, Felice C., and George M. Whitesides. No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale. Belknap Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780674035669. [Preview with Google Books]

———. On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science. Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780674026889.

### 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 - 1.4MB): 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.

## Course Info

##### Instructor

- Felice C. Frankel

##### Departments

- Chemical Engineering

##### As Taught In

Spring 2026

##### Level

Undergraduate

##### Topics

- Engineering
  - Computer Science
    - Artificial Intelligence
- Fine Arts
  - Visual Arts
    - Graphic Design
    - Photography
- Health and Medicine
- Science
  - Biology
  - Chemistry
  - Physics
- Teaching and Education

##### Learning Resource Types

assignment_turned_in Activity Assignments with Examples
co_present Instructor Insights
equalizer Lecture Audio
theaters Lecture Videos

Browse Resources

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