Halmos Faculty Combine Art, Science in Presentation

For the past four years, Halmos College of faculty have been engaged in interdisciplinary efforts to combine science and art at NSU through a program where undergraduate art students visit the microbiology lab to learn how to use bacteria as “paint” and agar plates as their “canvas” to create agar art.

In June 2021, Julie Torruellas Garcia, Ph.D., and Katie Crump, Ph.D., from the Department of Biological Sciences; Kandy Lopez Moreno, M.F.A., from the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts; and former NSU visiting professor Veronique Cote, M.F.A., presented their poster titled, “Creating an Interdisciplinary Curriculum within the Undergraduate Arts and Sciences Through Agar Art,” at the 2021 American Society for Microbiology’s Conference for Undergraduate Educators.

In their presentation, they shared the agar art curriculum including learning outcomes and assessment tools and discussed the benefits of integrating science into the arts. They have written a manuscript of their work that was submitted for publication in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education and is currently under review.