Inaugural Contest Honors Electron Microscopy Images Taken by Students, Industry Users
Image by Brooke Coupal
06/05/2025
By Brooke Coupal
A gray, cloud-like substance swirls inward, creating a calm eye in the center. Wispy remnants break free from the vortex and get lost in a sea of blue.
A person looking at the image described above may confuse it for a hurricane captured by a satellite hundreds of miles away. In reality, the photo is of a tissue engineering scaffold, a 3D structure made of a biomaterial designed to enhance tissue regeneration, magnified 140 times.
The image “serves as a reminder that even in engineered environments, nature’s patterns and beauty can spontaneously emerge,” says biomedical engineering and biotechnology Ph.D. student Mert Gezek, who took the photo using a scanning electron microscope in the Microscopy Core Lab.
Gezek’s image won first place in the Core Research Facilities’ (CRF) inaugural Art in Science Image Competition, which centered around photos taken with high-powered microscopes that use a beam of electrons to capture images of microscopic specimens. The contest garnered 41 submissions from students and industry professionals who use the CRF for its world-class instrumentation.
“The competition was a way to celebrate the work that’s being done in our labs,” says CRF Assistant Director Kristin Bourgault.
“It gave a creative outlet for all the people who put so much effort into taking these images for their research,” adds Microscopy Core Lab Manager Anna Maria Routsi, who organized the competition.
Image by Brooke Coupal
Polymer science Ph.D. student Majid Akbar took second place with his black-and-white image of a fungal biofilm on denture materials, which is part of a research project that he’s working on with Chemistry Prof. Yuyu Sun.
“Science and art go hand in hand,” he says. “When you demonstrate your research with pictures, it makes it easier for people to understand.”
Third place went to plastics engineering Ph.D. student Nariman Rajabifar, and honorable mentions were awarded to Mubarak Ayinla, who recently earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, and Ioana Knopf, CEO and founder of Arrakis Materials, a startup company seeking to convert carbon dioxide into minerals to be used for construction materials, among other applications.
“I’m a proud user of the CRF,” Knopf says. “With startups, there’s not a lot of resources or funding, so having access to top-notch instrumentation through the CRF has been transformational for the research that we’re doing.”
A panel of six judges from across the university selected the winners, who each walked away with a cash prize. JEOL USA, a laboratory equipment supplier with instruments located in the CRF, sponsored the competition.
“For many years, we have had a really great partnership with the CRF and UMass Lowell,” says Jens Breffke, a senior sales manager at JEOL USA. “We were very happy to support this competition.”