The City College of New York’s Cohen Library sponsors a Biology Animation Assistantship program with an interdisciplinary team of students with science and art backgrounds. The goal is to use student-created works as teaching tools in and out of the classroom. This year the team is led by Professor Hysell Oviedo from the Biology department, and Professor Ching-Jung Chen from the Visual Resources Library. The topic of the current project is animating how neurons communicate with each other in the brain: a process called synaptic transmission.
The student team includes: Lenn Hypolite (Electronic Design Multimedia major), Rafay Malik (Electronic Design Multimedia), Katie Cheng (Studio Art major, Biology minor), and Advait Apte (Chemical and Life Science Engineering PhD, current Economics Masters). Students work collaboratively and teach each other about science concepts and computer programs needed to make the animations, such as Adobe Photoshop, AfterEffects, and Cinema40.