I'm Jacelyn Shu, I work in the BRC and I am the lab manager for Judith Mank [Music] I'm running a scientific illustration and communication workshop for the members of the BRC and the goal is to help people in the BRC, so anywhere from grad students to post-docs to faculty, to help them improve their scientific communication and illustration skills. Scientific illustration is illustration used in the context of scientific communication so if somebody has some complicated methods or some experimental setup that is difficult to explain using a bunch of words, then using an illustration or graphics would be a lot easier to get the point across. I did my Master's in the department and during the course of my Master's, I started learning how to make graphics for myself, for my thesis to use in presentations and talks and posters. Through that process I was able to practice making my illustrations and kind of distilling my science down into a way that was more accessible and that I found more understandable to present to people.

I proposed this Workshop because I thought that scientific communication and illustration were valuable skills that every scientist should have but we're not necessarily taught in the form of classes in grad school. Better visual communication is important in science because it helps scientists to more effectively convey their research and reach more people. So I think one of the hurdles that I'm trying to get over, or help people get over with this workshop, is helping them to see themselves as scientific communicators who can use the skill set of bringing in graphics into their into their communicating of their science. The first step is teaching people how to use the software because I think that's one of the one of the biggest learning curves that keeps people away from trying to start making their own figures and stuff. But I think another thing that I'm going to try and address in this workshop is how to actually distill some complicated concept down into a way that is linear and can be conveyed using graphics in a manner that is accessible to other scientists but also the public.

So what motivated you to join this workshop? Yeah, so I wanted to be able to make my own illustrations so I can make my future presentations pop and just be like, amazing, but I feel like learning how to use Adobe Illustrator was a really daunting task and really hard to do on your own. So just having someone be able to explain it so clearly and just, like, just get you like started on it for the future really helped a lot and I really appreciate it. So I have a lot of different organisms that I study in my research so I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn how to illustrate a lot of them for presentations and for parts of figures for my thesis. So yeah this was, like, a great chance, like, just as I was finishing the majority of my lab work so I had some time open up and then, yeah, now I get to learn a lot about how to illustrate those organisms in Illustrator; it's been great. And for me I think a lot of what I study can be a little confusing or very complex and I wanted to find a way to break it down to something that can be digested and I thought illustrations, like, graphics would be a good way to do it, and so again the workshop, and I felt like I learned a lot and I was able to accomplish that goal.