Promega fosters art and science through UW’s Cool Science Image contest

For more than five years, Promega has supported the annual Cool Science Image contest at UW-Madison. Campus members are invited to submit images that depict an object or phenomenon from any discipline, which could have been captured via microscopy, photography, medical imaging, schematics and science as art. Entries continue to grow year after year as interest in the contest grows.

The contest popularity has grown from campus to the broader community as the winning entries are shared on multiple UW–Madison websites and through the university social media accounts. The winning CSI entries are also showcased in a slide show at the annual Wisconsin Science Festival. And each fall there is an exhibit of winners, with an opening night celebration held at the McPherson Eye Research Institute’s Mandelbaum and Albert Family Vision Gallery on the ninth floor of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research.

 

This 2019 CSI winner features the developing brain of a 16-day-old embryonic mouse growing from neural stem cells (stained green) extending into the brain tissue from the edges of the black, fluid-filled ventricle at center.
Daniel Z. Radecki, postdoctoral researcher, Department of Comparative Biosciences, School of Veterinary Medicine; epifluorescence microscope
This 2018 CSI winner features thin slices of beets on a light table show off bands of red and yellow. UW–Madison botanists are studying how the pigments that create the vivid colors evolved in a very small group of plants.
Sarah Friedrich, media specialist, Department of Botany; digital camera