Sneha Chandrashekar, a sophomore neuroscience major at Penn, hadn’t touched a paintbrush since elementary school, but she did so to depict her post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research through art.

She painted her research on a ceramic shield, which became a literal and metaphorical symbol of protection and expression.

Sharing her creation with community members at a public showcase at the end of a summer science program she attended gave her an entirely new way to communicate the “why” behind her work. “Putting together the presentation to go along with my shield really made me think differently,” she said. “It wasn’t just the art, I also had to explain why I decided to design it the way I did.”

The discovery of new medical innovations can come with apprehension, skepticism and confusion, mostly because the way researchers talk about their work often doesn’t align with how the community is able to understand it.

The Translational Research Immersion Program for undergraduate students at Penn’s Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics is trying to bridge that gap by transforming how future scientists communicate about their research and connect with the community. The program’s artist-in-residence initiative introduces a simple yet revolutionary idea: what if scientists thought more like artists? Could creativity help decode research for the public, foster community engagement, and improve health outcomes?

In the program, students immerse themselves in the world of translational research, taking discoveries from the lab—like how something works in the human body—and turning them into medicine, tools, or treatments that doctors can use to help people feel better. The artist-in-residence program is designed to take that experience a step further, finding new ways to use art to make communicating about new scientific discoveries more powerful, engaging, and far-reaching.

Now in its fourth year, the design of the program has the artist-in-residence shadow students in their labs, workshops, seminars and presentations so the artist can experience what the students are learning and researching. Then both the artist and the students produce art as a way to share their research with the community, which helps break down some of the barriers to understanding science.

Through this process, the artists aren’t the only ones learning something new. As the students advance through the program, they begin to see their research not just as results and reports, but as stories waiting to be told. Through collaboration and reflection, they are challenged to translate complex research into visual art that connects the broader community with revolutionary discoveries in medicine.

Assistant professor of psychiatry Nicholas Balderston is Sneha Chandrashekar’s mentor, and also participated in the program, creating a shield of his own. He found it a grounding exercise and a way to filter out noise and distill his research to its core premise. “It helps you think about your science from the most fundamental perspective,” he said. “How do I boil this down into one piece, one idea, one image?”

Julie Rainbow, the program’s inaugural artist-in-residence in 2022, described her project Invisible Threads as a journey into the unseen connections that bind us and transcend physical and ideological divides. “Art becomes a bridge between past and future,” she reflected, “a way to deepen understanding and push the boundaries of a discipline like science.” Her work underscores how ambiguity and intuition can reveal truths that data alone cannot.

Angela McQuillen, who assumed the residency the following year, found herself on a steep learning curve when confronted with the highly technical information. “It was a challenge because a lot of it I did not immediately understand and I had to narrow down the information that I was most interested in taking a deeper dive into,” she said.

Even with this challenge, the experience reinforced her belief in the power of creative collaboration. “In a group of people from many different educational experiences, backgrounds, and age groups, we connected so easily when we focused on our shared creativity and humanity,” she said. 

Marguerita Hagan, the most recent artist-in-residence, worked with the students to have them create a ceramic shield to represent their research and helped them develop presentations to explain their shield and how it embodied their work. “The shield is a thing of protection and demonstrates strength,” she explained. “Using it as a storytelling medium helps break down the silos between science and the public while reinforcing the power of healthy communities.” Simply put, as she said in a recent story on the program in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “It’s taking this intense science and making it visual.”

The Translational Research Immersion Program, one of a suite of educational programs comprising ITMAT Education, is a competitive internship that brings together students from 12 partner institutions, including Penn. Over ten weeks, students conduct mentored research with guidance from Penn Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) scientists while participating in research seminars, professional development, social events, and artistic collaborations.

Adapted from a Penn Medicine news release by Carmen Lennon, August 18, 2025.