Janet Iwasa
Dyche Mullins
Janet Iwasa is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Utah. As head of the Animation Lab, her broad goal is to create accurate and compelling molecular and cellular visualizations that support research, learning and scientific communication.
As a postdoctoral fellow, she created a multimedia exhibit with Jack Szostak and the Museum of Science in Boston, and later worked on biological visualizations as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco for her work on the actin cytoskeleton in the laboratory of Dyche Mullins.
Over the past two decades, there has been a rapid growth in the use of animation as a means to communicate complex biological processes to a wide range of audiences. Dr. Iwasa's group and others have seen that 3D animation software can be used to synthesize spatial and dynamic information from a variety of experimental modalities, and that this process can provide important scientific insights and provide a contextualized view of how molecular and cellular systems operate.
These visualizations have served not only to make molecular concepts more accessible to students and the public, but have also proven to be extremely useful for researchers seeking to build and refine their hypotheses.
In this talk, Dr. Iwasa will discuss past projects using 3D animation to describe diverse biological processes, a current project on developing new software tools for creating and sharing animated models, and consider the future of molecular visualization.