Frankel wins Lennart Nilsson Award

Felice Frankel, scientific imagist and Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award for scientific or nature photography.

Frankel was cited for creating images described by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which oversees the award, as “exquisite works of art and crystal-clear scientific photographs – both fascinating and valuable to the general public and scientific community alike.”

The Lennart Nilsson Award is presented annually in honor of the internationally renowned Swedish photographer whose photographs of conception and fetal development brought the reality of human reproduction to the pages of Life Magazine. 

“Felice Frankel’s work,” like Nilsson’s, “reveals previously invisible aspects of the world in unique, novel ways,” Institute officials wrote. “Her subjects range from nanotechnology to magnetism and the surface tension of water droplets.”

Frankel said that she felt humbled to be named this year’s Lennart Nilsson winner, and said that it’s ”most important to recognize the extraordinary community of science researchers who have devoted their lives to creating the amazing research which I continue to have the privilege of documenting.”

In selecting Felice Frankel, the board of the Lennart Nilsson Foundation stated: “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.”

Frankel has previously received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design for her previous work photographing the built landscape and architecture.

(For a profile of Felice Frankel, see A Life in Science.)