Natasha S Myers

Natasha Myers

Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
York University
Toronto, Canada
nmyers@yorku.ca
Personal Web Site: http://web.mit.edu/nmyers/www

Areas of Interest

• structural biology // biological engineering // molecular machines // anthropology and history of science // modeling, imaging and simulation // pedagogy // embodiment // tacit knowledge // gesture and affect // performance of scientific knowledge // ...

Description of Research

• Natasha’s dissertation research explores the lively visual cultures of twenty-first-century structural biology and biological engineering, with a focus on pedagogy and training in the arts of molecular visualization. This ethnography examines the making of a new generation of life scientists and the formation of professional identities around novel three- and four-dimensional imaging, modeling and simulation techniques that can render living bodies visible at the molecular scale. As visualization practices change, she is observing the emergence of new modes of embodiment and biological imaginations, tracking how they propagate in pedagogical and professional contexts, including classrooms, teaching laboratories, research labs, and conferences. She examines how proteins are figured and continually reconfigured as simultaneously machinic and lively, looking at how the mechanisms of ‘molecular machines’ are conceptualized and performed through gestures and affects that scientists use to flesh-out, animate and relay their embodied knowledge of molecular forms and movements.

Publications

• Myers, Natasha (2006) "Animating Mechanism: Animations and the Propagation of Affect in the Lively Arts of Protein Modeling." Science Studies, Special Issue on the Future of Feminist Technoscience, 19 (2): 6-30.

• “Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography” is forthcoming in the journal Social Studies of Science.

• "Performing the Protein Fold: The Pedagogical Lives of Molecular Models" is forthcoming in The Inner History of Devices: Ethnography and the First Person, edited by Sherry Turkle.

Awards

• Nicholas C. Mullins Award, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). This prize is awarded by this international organization to one graduate student each year for outsanding scholarship in science and technology studies.

• NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant

• Spencer Foundation Fellowship

• MIT Benjamin Siegel Prize, Honorable Mention. The Siegel Prize is awarded to an MIT student for best essay on science, technology and society.

Current CV

Click here for pdf of current CV

Bodies in Time: Dance, Plants and Biological Visualization ...

Genetically modified Arabidopsis thaliana flower bud expressing green fluorescent protein, visualized under ultraviolet light.
Micrograph by Natasha Myers

For more on my dance and imaging projects see http://web.mit.edu/nmyers/www