iGEM Wrap-Up

The iGEM Championship wrapped up earlier this month, and I’ve been meaning to conclude the series of post on the topic, and congratulate all teams that participated at the event. The MIT team, who I featured in an earlier post, finished the competition with fantastic results, winning the Health & Medicine project track, as well as placing as a grand finalist at the World Championships.

Several team at iGEM used Maya and the Molecular Maya toolkit, in order to help create scientific visualizations to support their projects and presentations. You can also take a look at some of the work that has been created by leading scientific animators at the MolecularMovies website, and find some tutorials here.

Autodesk University Innovation Forums

Autodesk University is taking place this week, and I thought it was relevant to note in this post that Drew Berry, a leading biomedical animator, will be presenting at an Innovation Forum. Drew, who works at the Walter + Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, has dedicated much of his work to help educate the public about critical topics in medical research. Using Maya and Molecular Maya, he has created accurate visualizations to better understand the way we think about biological process, and how the body responds to it. You can find examples of his work on the Walter + Eliza Hall website.

Drew Berry also recently worked on Björk’s recently released Biophilia album. For the project, he created stunning biological animations that were used for the artist’s video. An interview with Drew about the project is available on Dazed Digital.

Here is Drew's animations in Björk’s “Hollow” video.

Cyberscreen Science Film Festival

For any readers who would like to test their chops and create a scientific-drive animation of their own, Scientific American writer Dr. Carin Bondar has organized the second annual ‘Cyberscreen Science Film Festival’, which will take place at the Science Online conference from January 19th-21st. This year’s festival has introduced a animation prize category for films that are created using Maya.

You can find out about submission guideline and details about the event here.