Felice Frankel, Principal Visual Communications Advisor

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering with additional support from Mechanical Engineering. She joined MIT in 1994.

Frankel is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC), and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology.

Frankel developed and instructed the first online MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) for edX addressing science and engineering photography. The following link will take you to the 34 tutorials and supplemental material, now available on MIT’s Open Courseware. “Making Science and Engineering Pictures, A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work.” (course 0.111x)

In 2001, Frankel founded the Image and Meaning workshops and conferences whose purpose was to develop new approaches to promote the public understanding of science through visual expression. She was also principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded program, “Picturing to Learn”, an effort to study how making representations by students, aids in teaching and learning, (Picturing to Learn).

Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Felice Frankel’s images have appeared in outlets such as National Geographic, Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, PNAS, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science and New Scientist, among others.

Additionally, Frankel has been profiled in the New York Times, WIRED, Life, Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Science Friday” and various European publications. She exhibits her work throughout the United States and in Europe and her limited-edition photographs are included in a number of corporate and private collections. Specific works were also displayed in the exhibition, “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art.

Frankel's website