Artist Ranger Liu, right, shoots video of Zachary Amador of rhe Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology during “SxAffold,” the science and art program sponsored by BBI and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center,
If it were not for a biotechnology course at a community college, Zachary Amador, a Ph.D. candidate in the UW Medicine Department of Genome Sciences, would be pursuing his other passion: art.
But, for five days in June, he was able to combine science and art in a program sponsored by BBI and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He was teamed up with Ranger Liu, a Seattle artist and UW graduate student. The pair were two of several scientists and artists, including Genome Sciences Department Chair Maitreya Dunham, Ph.D.
This unique endeavor with a unique title, “SxAffold,” (“Scaffold”) was co-hosted at the Hutch by Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor in the Hutch’s Herbold Computational Biology Program. Their colleagues, Callie Chappell (a Postdoctoral Fellow from Stanford) and Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano (an art curator and Ph.D. candidate at Cornell) came up with the idea and jointly ran it.
“The goal of SxAffold was to enable artists to experience scientific spaces that are otherwise inaccessible,” said Sinnott-Armstrong. “We also wanted to create a fun environment for scientists and artists to explore and learn together and from each other!” Indeed, watching Amador and Liu together in a lab, it is quite apparent they learned a great deal from each other, exploring their respective work over five days.
