Seeing is Believing

The primary cause of cancer death is the metastasis and spread of the tumour, as stationary tumours can be surgically removed. However, what makes the tumours move? My research focuses on a protein called vimentin, which is only present in tumours that invade and metastasise. We discovered that vimentin actually drives cancer cells to move faster and more efficiently. Maybe blocking it could stop metastasis? Could this protein be the key to preventing cancer from spreading?

Visualizations are important for communicating and understanding scientific explanations, oftentimes involving structures and processes that are otherwise hard to imagine; abstract, complex, unobservable, or occurring over very large or small time scales. This makes teaching and learning science challenging. Visualizations can also be misleading if not interpreted properly or viewed uncritically.
This talk will revolve around how scientific knowledge has been, and currently is, visually communicated and used in formal and informal science education to support learning, with examples from evolution and ecology.