![]() Grill-Spector said she enjoys witnessing the creativity of her students and seeing how they relate art and science. For their final assignment, students build or draw an illusion. This is one of the reasons she incorporates an art project into the curriculum for her undergraduate class, Introduction to Perception. “Having good visuals really helps convey ideas and information in a clear way – it’s a really good way to get people to understand your idea,” she explained. Grill-Spector finds there is a clear relationship between understanding art and being able to communicate science effectively. “I think I have a really good visual understanding of things, and that’s why I like painting and why I like studying vision,” she said. Now, as a cognitive neuroscientist, professor of psychology and member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and Stanford Bio-X, she studies how visual recognition works. She shifted her focus to computer vision, which then led her to neurobiology, where she ended up modeling the brain using her computer skills. Grill-Spector was originally intent on becoming an engineer but found she was more interested in computations. It’s more emotional and helps my mind both wander and concentrate,” she said. With bold colors and thick lines, Grill-Spector paints vivid images of people, animals and scenes. She continued taking art classes throughout her undergraduate and graduate education. “I really enjoyed the intellectual part of engineering but I needed a more creative outlet,” she said. But it wasn’t until college, when she was looking for a mental escape from her engineering classes, that she began taking formal art classes. Painting and drawing were always a part of Kalanit Grill-Spector’s childhood. ![]() Kalanit Grill-Spector, professor of psychology Mabuchi is also a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. “And it’s great for those of us in the sciences, engineering, math who are interested in pursuing art to make ourselves visible to our students … to provide a role model of that and to give each other permission to do that.” “It’s very natural to have interests both in artistic pursuits and in scientific ones,” he said. He feels that teaching at this intersection is an opportunity for him to contemplate broader questions about “meaning and meaning-making,” while also showing students that science and art aren’t mutually exclusive. Some of his recent work combines clay and textiles.įor undergraduates, Mabuchi teaches a course on ceramics, physics and the creative process. During his residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft two years ago, Mabuchi started loom weaving. ![]() He has recently curated several displays at Stanford, including a gallery of his electron microscope images and an exhibition of East Asian ceramics. Intrigued by the transformation of uniform, bare clay into a riot of colors and textures, he has made many hundreds of wood-fired pieces, built his own blown-ash kiln on campus and studied the physical and chemical process of wood-firing using electron microscopes at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities. Getting into wood-firing solidified Mabuchi’s devotion to ceramics. “In the end, I really liked the activity and community I found in physics.” “I remember going to college thinking maybe I would do economics or aeronautical engineering, and I had a period of deep interest in linguistics and philosophy,” he said. As for being a physicist to boot, Mabuchi has always had broad interests. So, although he began making ceramics on “a bit of a whim,” it was another way of engaging with what he’d long appreciated. Hideo Mabuchi grew up in a culture that values traditional craft and began collecting it himself during his travels. Hideo Mabuchi, professor of applied physics
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