Vizbi Showcase: Bridging Science, Art and Design

Janet Iwasa is a data visualisation expert and research assistant professor of Biochemistry at the University of Utah. She is recognised for her molecular and cellular visualisations, which have appeared in scientific journals including Nature, Science and Cell, as well as in the New York Times. She was named one of Fast Company's '100 Most Creative People' in 2012, one of Foreign Policy Magazine's '100 Leading Global Thinkers' in 2014, and is a 2014 TED fellow and 2017 TED senior fellow. She received her PhD in cell biology in 2006 from the University of California, San Francisco. Following a highly successful tenure at Harvard University, she moved to the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Martin Krzywinski is a renowned data scientist and communicator. He is known for his work in bioinformatics, data visualisation and the interface of science and art. He created the Circos graph to display genomic data sets in a way that revealed their inner structure and served as an emblem of the new field. His information graphics have appeared in New York Times, Wired, Scientific American and covers of numerous books and scientific journals such as Nature and Genome Research. Krzywinski's work has set a new standard for the presentation of scientific results and established design as a tool of discovery in the research process itself.

Seán O’Donoghue is a senior principal research scientist at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Sydney. He is also lab group leader at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. He received his B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD in biophysics from the University of Sydney, Australia. Much of his career was spent in Heidelberg, Germany, where he worked in the Structural and Computational Biology programme at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and also at Lion Bioscience AG — then the world's largest bioinformatics company — where he was director of Scientific Visualization.

His work has received many awards, including the Elsevier Grand Challenge (first prize), the Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research (finalist, 2015), the NSW Emerging Creative Talent Award (finalist, 2015), and the NSW iAward for Research and Development (first prize, 2015). His contributions have been recognised with a C. J. Martin Fellowship from the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia, an Achievement Award from Lion Bioscience AG, and by being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.