Felice Frankel

Felice Frankel is an American researcher and photographer of scientific images. She has received multiple awards, both for the aesthetic quality of her science photographs and for her ability to effectively communicate complicated scientific information in images.

Early life and education Born in Brooklyn, Felice Frankel attended Midwood High School and then Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she majored in biology. She became an architectural photographer.

Frankel and her work have been profiled in The New York Times, Wired, Life Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Science Friday, The Christian Science Monitor, and various European publications. Her limited-edition photographs are included in a number of corporate and private collections, and were part of MOMA’s 2008 exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind. Her work was featured in the 2016 MIT Museum exhibition Images of Discovery: Communicating Science through Photography.

Frankel founded the "Image and Meaning" workshops and conferences to develop new approaches for promoting the public understanding of science through visual expression. She also was principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded program "Picturing to Learn", an effort to study how making representations aids students in teaching and learning.

Image integrity Frankel is a strong advocate of image integrity for scientific and documentary photographic images. She encourages researches to question various image adjustment and enhancement techniques such as color enhancement, grayscale inversion, or selective deletion of distracting or irrelevant elements, as well as more subtle manipulations of image histograms, all in service of goals such as clarity of communication.

Ultimately, the decision must not change the data. She insists that all image manipulation must be fully disclosed, to avoid misleading the reader regarding the integrity of the scientific images. In her 2018 book, Frankel has reprinted the journal publication guidelines of Nature, Science, and Cell, comparing the extensively detailed directives of the first journal with the minimal guidance given in the latter two publications as of her book's publication deadline. The Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University Graduate School of Design Chancellor's Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Irvine 2009 – Progress Medal of the Photographic Society of America, PSA's highest award 2007 – Lennart Nilsson Award for Scientific Photography: "Those viewing Ms. Frankel's images are initially captivated by their form and colour. No sooner is their curiosity aroused than they want to know what the photograph depicts. She has thus fulfilled a scientific reporter's paramount task: to awaken people's interest and desire to learn."

Books