Picture Perfect

Competition casts new eye on student efforts

The development of a galaxy in space, cells that seem to smile, family relationships, and a microscopic image evoking a season’s first snowfall—these are but a few of the hundreds of submissions presented over the years at the University of Illinois Image of Research competition.

The 11-year-old effort pushes students to view their research in a different light and share it with the world. Open to both graduate and undergraduate students, the annual event has drawn nearly 850 entries in its lifetime, showcasing the work of multiple disciplines, including life sciences, engineering, social sciences, the humanities, and fine and applied art.

“We were thinking about ways to outreach to the campus community,” said Merinda Kaye Hensley, an associate professor at the Library who has helmed the undergraduate portion of the competition since the beginning. The idea of finding a single image that reflects the meaning of their research seemed to offer a way for students to process their efforts and analyze them differently. Initially spurred by a similar project at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Urbana-Champaign version has since inspired more than 50 such efforts in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The contest has strict rules regarding deadlines, format, and other requirements, with a few key elements: the image itself, a title, a short essay explaining the link between image and research, and judging by a multidisciplinary panel that considers the entry’s originality, visual impact, and connection between image, text, and research. In addition, students must agree to allow their work to be submitted to IDEALS (the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship), a University Library online resource providing access to research and scholarship produced at the Urbana campus.

But beyond these technicalities, the vision of the contest is wide open. Depictions of research can be concrete (displaying crystallization within a kidney stone) or abstract (altering a scene to depict the effects of different wording when describing immigration). Each year, the images may tantalize, grip, or amuse as they portray concepts as diverse as chemical reactions, historical events, the intricacies of the natural and physical world, and the dreams of individuals and society.

The exposure the students get is one of the valuable outcomes of the project. Undergraduate entries are displayed and winners announced at the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, held each spring. Monetary awards go to first and second place, as well as the people’s choice. For graduate entries, which are more numerous and are displayed in an on-site exhibition, monetary awards are available for first, second, and third place; honorable mentions; and people’s choice. An added plus is that the IDEALS website—where entries are placed—attracts the attention of researchers and the lay public worldwide.

“I’ve heard from dozens of students over the years who thank us for the opportunity to think about their research in a different way, to share it [more broadly] with additional communities, to get the word out about what they’re doing,” Hensley said. One student’s Image of Research entry even boosted his acceptance for graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I wanted to send in a final update and thanks before I graduate,” Mit Kotak emailed Hensley last spring, in explaining that he was headed to MIT in the fall. “During my interview, the interviewers specifically brought up the Image of Research competition and how that helped me stand out from other applications.” (For the record, Kotak’s entry in the 2022 undergraduate program depicted a 3D visualization of a binary black hole merger, winning him first place and $300.)

The Graduate College and the Library’s Scholarly Commons organize the graduate side of the project, while the undergraduate portion falls within the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Library’s Teaching, Learning, and Academic Support unit. Over the years, the competition has explored a variety of sponsors and creative resources for funding, including the UI Division of Intercollegiate Athletics, grants, Library Friends, and individual donors. In 2022, the Scholarly Commons used a gift from Mardell J. O’Brien ‘72 LAS, MA ‘73 LAS, MS ‘97 LIS to underwrite both the undergraduate and graduate versions of the event. A more stable source of funding would help with prize money, displays, and celebratory gestures.

“I think that . . . we’re seeing generally in society that there is this pushback against academia, and that we all work in our own bubble,” Hensley said. She believes the competition offers students an avenue to explain the impact of their research on society and culture.

“It’s an important exercise for . . . students to think about their research in different ways to be able to talk about it with different kinds of people with different kinds of backgrounds. And [the Image of Research] really helps them do that,” Hensley said.

“It gets them out of their labs, out of their heads, out of their conversations with their professors to say, ‘What am I doing? And why is it important? How do I share it?’”