Felice Frankel, a leading expert in the use of imagery to express scientific data and concepts, offers a lecture titled More Than Pretty Pictures: The Power of the Science Image at 4:30 p.m. Friday, March 2, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall, Bates College, Andrews Road.

The event is part of a celebration that marks the opening of Bates’ Imaging and Computing Center, an innovative facility that serves as a “one-stop shop” for the high-tech rendering of visual information.

The event is open to the public at no cost. Refreshments will be offered at 4:15 p.m. For more information, please call 207-753-6945.

A photographer and senior research fellow at Harvard University, Frankel heads the Envisioning Science program at Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing. She holds a concurrent appointment as a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Produced in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Frankel’s images have been published in more 300 journal articles and/or covers and various other publications for general audiences.

“Frankel has seamlessly brought science, art, and technology together to create a new hub for the expression of ideas in the scientific community,” wrote Tim McIntire, an author for the Apple Inc. Web site, in a profile of Frankel.

Completed in January, Bates’ Imaging and Computing Center occupies the attractively renovated first floor of the Coram Library, built in 1902. The center enhances Bates’ ability to teach visual presentation and interpretive skills that nowadays are as much the scientist’s preserve as the artist’s.

Distinctively among Bates’ peer colleges, the center assembles high-tech gear — from optical microscopes to large-format printers to 20 powerful black-cased Dells in a computing center — that enables student and faculty researchers to capture, interpret and present in visual form all manner of information.

“This is the one site on campus where many students can congregate and work with computers especially suited for viewing and working with images,” says Nancy Koven, assistant professor of psychology. Koven and some of her students will use the facility to work with magnetic resonance images, or MRI scans, of the human brain as they investigate correlations between physical brain structures and neurological or psychiatric disorders.

Because visual representations can include everything from digital art photos to genomic data, the center is seen, too, as an expression of Bates’ dedication to teaching and learning across subject boundaries. “I know of imaging labs at other institutions with similar computing capabilities,” Koven adds, “but what distinguishes our Imaging Center is that it’s inherently interdisciplinary. I don’t know of other imaging centers where faculty and students in neuroscience could be doing intense and meaningful work while sitting only a few feet from faculty and staff in visual arts or cellular biology.”

Frankel has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for her work photographing the built landscape and architecture. She is the author of Envisioning Science, The Design and Craft of the Science Image (The MIT Press, 2002) and her column, “Sightings,” appears regularly in American Scientist magazine.

Bates College is one of nine Maine institutions that will benefit from a federal grant of nearly $18 million designed to expand biomedical research opportunities across the state.

Maine Gov. John Baldacci announced the five-year, $17.8 million award, called the IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) grant, during a press conference today at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, one of two research facilities involved in the grant process. Baldacci and the participating institutions see the grant as a boost to Maine’s efforts to develop a technically skilled workforce and strengthen its research capacity.

In addition to Bates and MDIBL, which is the lead institution in the Maine INBRE program, institutions collaborating in the grant are: The Jackson Laboratory, Bowdoin and Colby colleges, the College of the Atlantic and three campuses of the University of Maine System: Farmington, Machias and the flagship campus, at Orono.

The overarching goal of the INBRE grant is to expand the biomedical research capacity that the institutions (except the Farmington and Machias schools) previously established through the Biomedical Research Network (BRIN). The network makes research resources and opportunities available to faculty and students at the participating schools, provides outreach to other educational institutions in Maine and helps steer students toward career opportunities in health research.

INBRE provides funding for each institution to strengthen and expand its research programs with a common focus on comparative functional genomics. INBRE also addresses Maine’s growing need for a technically skilled workforce by providing concentrated research training opportunities to more than 500 undergraduate students throughout the state.

The program supports intensive training workshops at the Mount Desert facility for undergraduate students and faculty. Bates has held those during the college’s Short Term each spring. In addition, faculty research, student research and student thesis projects benefit from the grant, and grant funds will support Bates staff positions related to biomedical research.

Other benefits to Bates include the establishment of an imaging and computing center that will enhance the college’s research capabilities in genomics and bioinformatics, a field that explores the application of information science to biology.

“This equipment will be shared by multiple departments and programs at Bates,” says Pam Baker, an associate dean of faculty and biology professor — “leading, we hope, to additional opportunities for collaboration within the college, and within the INBRE network in Maine.”

The BRIN and the INBRE programs are funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The INBRE grant is an institutional development award available to states that have a success rate of less than 20 percent in competing for NIH grants or that have received less than $70 million on average in NIH support from 1995 to 1999. The program is intended to help these states build the necessary infrastructure to compete more successfully for federal NIH dollars and, more important, to support and conduct cutting-edge biomedical research.