Engineering Futures Colloquium Series, Sponsored by HII

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering with additional support from Mechanical Engineering. She joined MIT in 1994.

Felice is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC), and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology.

She developed and instructed the first online MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) for edX addressing science and engineering photography, “Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work” (course 0.111x). The course’s 34 tutorials and supplemental materials are available on MIT OpenCourseWare.

In 2001, Felice founded the Image and Meaning workshops and conferences whose purpose was to develop new approaches to promote the public understanding of science through visual expression. She was also principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded program, “Picturing to Learn”, an effort to study how making representations by students, aids in teaching and learning science.

Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, her images have appeared in outlets such as Nature, Science, JACS, PNAS, Langmuir, Joule, National Geographic, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science, and New Scientist, among others.

Additionally, Felice has been profiled in the New York Times, WIRED, Life, Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Science Friday”, and various European publications. Her limited-edition photographs are included in a number of corporate and private collections, and her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including at the Kennedy Center Arts Summit (“Wonder”), Museum of Modern Art (“Design and the Elastic Mind”), New York Hall of Science, and along the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and as a traveling exhibition supported by Bracco Imaging Group in Italy, including Genoa, Rome, Naples, Perugia, Milano, and New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.

Barry Polakowski is the senior director of HII’s Specialty Engineering team, which is part of the Warfare Systems group in HII’s Mission Technologies division. This team comprises cleared hardware, software and research engineers who solve some of the hardest and highestclassified challenges the U.S. government encounters.

Polakowski is responsible for research, development and operational microelectronics reverse-engineering programs, and his team performs many quick-reaction capability efforts across multiple customers.

Prior to supporting the U.S. government, he designed and developed telecommunications equipment and test hardware for leading industry suppliers.

Polakowski earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1999.

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