Where art & research meet: Esperluette
We are happy to announce a new collaboration between the MCAA and the art-meets-research outreach project Esperluette.
Esperluette (French for ampersand — the ‘&’ symbol) is an exciting public outreach project that aims to share scientific topics with the greater public by linking them with art in a single workpiece.
The project was conceived — as many good projects are — during a soirée. From there, in December 2015, Fernanda Haffner and Émilie Schmidt joined forces and merged art and science, to create a non-profit “journal” that is based on the belief that knowledge empowers people and it is our duty to make sure our research is communicated to the public at large.
Each Esperluette edition tells a story about a piece of research, covering a range of disciplines from chemistry, literature and informatics to geography forestry and linguistics — to name just a few. On a single folded A4 paper (and a blog post), research topics are explained in an engaging narrative and are accompanied by artwork inspired by the research. The illustrations were created by an artist from a non-science background.
While Esperluette may only be a mesmerising glimpse into each research topic, it is a crucial one for our collective future and as a bridge between scientific and non-scientific communities.
This month’s Esperluette announced the collaboration with the MCAA, featuring our very own Marie Skłodowska-Curie as a superhero who joins forces with Esperluette.
“MCAA is fuelled by diversity and equality. It is a place where all international brains meet, whether they are in engineering, social, environmental or hard sciences. It is such a rich and inspirational environment that Esperluette hopes to unleash more people’s curiosity towards scientific research, whether it is conducting it or simply wishing to increase their understanding of complex science topics.”
If you would like to learn more about the Esperluette project, get involved — e.g. by becoming a local ambassador — or you would like your research to be featured, please contact: esperluette.nancy@gmail.com
About the authors
Fernanda Haffner is a Food Engineer with a PhD in Chemistry. Her PhD thesis, included in the MSCA ITN called BIBAFOODS, explored the world of encapsulation of probiotics. She is most passionate about her research on human microbiomes, but it is not only bugs that capture her curiosity. This is, in part, why Esperluette subsists — thanks to Fernanda’s number one rule to never stop exploring. Besides managing the project and unleashing her creativity as a writer, her main occupation is as a consultant for TechScout, a French consultancy firm that deals with scientific projects mostly related to chemistry and biology.
Valerie Bentivegna has recently completed a PhD in Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, where she was part of the MSCA ITN project PHOQUS. She currently works for a chemical engineering start-up in Seattle, teaches LEGO robotics part-time, and has an interest in science communication and informal education. She is the chair of the MCAA communication workgroup.
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