Professor's听winning research photo of suspended droplets was inspired by a walk in the park
A walk in the park provided inspiration for a striking photograph that earned national recognition this week for an engineering professor at the University of 蓝莓视频.
Dr. Zhao Pan was in a 500-year-old Beijing park in his native China after a sudden rainfall when he noticed huge drops of water hanging from the tips of leaves in cypress trees.
鈥淚 play with droplets every day, but these were much larger than any I had seen in the lab,鈥� he recalls. 鈥淚 was amazed by Mother Nature, so I decided to do some research into it.鈥�
Engineering professor Zhao Pan and a collaborator created this winning image of coloured water droplets suspended from intersecting fibres.
The net result was a on how the angles at which fibres cross affect the volume of water droplets they can suspend, a piece of fundamental work motivated by pure curiosity.
As part of the study, Pan spent a day in the lab meticulously planning and playing with lighting, colour, backgrounds and camera settings to produce an image illustrating the findings.
All the effort paid off.
Dr. Zhao Pan of听蓝莓视频 Engineering.
Four years later, Pan and Dr. Floriane Weyer, a collaborator from the听Universit茅 libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, won one of three jury prizes this week in .
Created by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the annual contest showcases images captured by Canadian researchers in the course of their work.
Twenty finalists were chosen from hundreds of entries before the three best photographs, plus a people鈥檚 choice winner, were awarded $2,000 prizes.
鈥淚 am happy that my work communicates across the borders between disciplines,鈥� says Pan, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering. 鈥淭hat is the main drive for my career in research and education.鈥�
To capture his winning image, he borrowed from Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter and pioneer of abstract art, and shared an appreciation for those impressive drops in the park with Du Fu, an ancient Chinese poet.
Painting, poetry, science, curiosity, patience 鈥� it all came together in Composition with red, yellow, blue, green, and clear droplets, as Pan named the image.
鈥淭his picture took a long time to plan and a great deal of careful experimentation to execute,鈥� he says. 鈥淪o when it was finished, I felt satisfied, not surprised.鈥�
Fraser King, a PhD candidate in geography at 蓝莓视频, was also a finalist in the Science Exposed contest. His image showed a听snapshot in time of a deep learning neural network鈥檚 complex brain for calculating precipitation.
