Exhibition showcases the 'art o...( PRINCETON N.J. The online gallery f...)

PRINCETON, N.J. The online gallery for Princeton University's third Art of Science competition will go live Thursday, May 14, at noon EDT. An online site that allows members of the public to choose their favorite 2009 Art of Science image will go live at the same time.

The juried show features 48 works chosen from more than 200 submissions, and the online gallery can be found here:

www.princeton.edu/artofscience/2009

The theme of this year's competition was "found art," with the organizers of the exhibit soliciting scientific images created during the course of an actual research project, rather than art inspired by science.

"This show exuberantly supports the idea that images produced in the pursuit of science can have an aesthetic value that is on a par with art created for art's sake," said Andrew Zwicker, the head of Science Education at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program.

"We hope that this exhibit will serve as a window through which the wider, non-technical audience can appreciate and understand the importance of scientific research," said Adam Finkelstein, associate professor of computer science and one of the exhibit organizers.

The top three prize winners for 2009 Art of Science competition were announced at a gallery opening on the Princeton University campus on May 8.

First prize went to Celeste Nelson, assistant professor chemical engineering, for baby squid, an image of squid embryos taken using bright field microscopy. Second prize went to Pat Watson, Mike Gaevski, Joe Palmer, and Conrad Sylvestre of Princeton's Micro/Nanofabrication Laboratory (MNFL) for their entry Desert Butte, a scanning electron microscope image. Third Prize went to Maria Ciocca, a 2005 alumna now at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, for Worm Love, an image taken using immunof
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