Felice Frankel, science photographer

Last week the New York Times had an interesting article about science photographer Felice Frankel.

For Ms. Frankel, 62, this work is a return to a major interest of her youth, when she studied science and aspired to a career as a chemist. Born Felice Oringel in Brooklyn, she attended Midwood High School and Brooklyn College, where she majored in biology. After graduation, she worked in a cancer research lab at Columbia. “Science has always been in my soul,” she said.

But life intervened. She married Kenneth Frankel. He was sent to Vietnam. When he returned, they moved to western Massachusetts, where he worked as a chest surgeon and they raised two sons.

But when Dr. Frankel returned from Vietnam, he brought a gift. “It was a very good camera,” Ms. Frankel said. “And that’s not trivial, that it was good.”

She started taking photographs. “Probably I was good,” she said, but because the camera was good, too.

It turned out that Frankel has a keen eye for the creation of images that both please the eye and convey the science.

Frankel is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard, where she heads the Envisioning Science program and is also an appointed M.I.T. research scientist, where she works with scientists and engineers to photograph their experiments.

More about Frankel:

• Felice Frankel at M.I.T
• Apple Science Profiles: Felice Frankel
• Video of lecture: Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image

Tags: Felice Frankel, photography