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Alumni Profiles
Mesa Schumacher ’04 Science and Medical Artist, Biological and Archeological Illustrator
01 Mesa
Schumacher
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wo-thousand nineteen is an exciting time to be a graphic artist, according to Mesa Schumacher ’04. This year, Mesa’s artwork has appeared in both Scientific American and National Geographic Magazine, among other scientific publications. At times, Mesa is creating art to better people’s lives by illustrating anatomy and what is going on in the body. Other times she might be creating animation modules to illustrate how a surgery will unfold or visually translating real data from MRIs.
“Art is so important right now,” says Mesa, who holds a master’s degree in Biological and Medical Art from Johns Hopkins University. Currently, her studio and home are in Nepal, where she lives with her diplomat husband, Austin Lewis, and their one and a-half year old daughter, Zephyr. “Science art is a groundbreaking area where data is coming into art.” Mesa’s role as an artist is to translate complex scientific material for the general public, and at other times, to communicate information from scientist to scientist. “Often scientists are in the weeds—they know so much, but they can’t step back,” explains Mesa. “So it’s nice for them to work with someone like me who has a somewhat substantive knowledge of their field and can probe and ask questions, such as what is exciting about this information? What is ground breaking? What matters? I am a visual information translator and sometimes that means being very simple, other times big and flashy is what matters.”
02 Portraits of women in
STEM careers for Womens History Month (from left): Mae Carol Jemison, Chien Shiung Wu, Rachel Carson, Hedy Lamarr, Marie Curie, and Barbara McClintock 03 Illustration for Scientific
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American, September 2018, comparing brain areas responsible for higher cognitive functions in humans and chimpanzees. 04 Illustration of an ochre
sea star ecosystem
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