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, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, Andrews Road.

The event is part of a celebration that marks the opening of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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, 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, occupies the attractively renovated first floor of the Coram Library, built in 1902. The center enhances ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ ability to teach visual presentation and interpretive skills that nowadays are as much the scientist’s preserve as the artist’s.

Distinctively among ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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.

Views with a room: With a flatscreen video wall behind her, Jacqueline Smith ’07 studies in the new Imaging Center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Now open in a sleekly renovated section of Coram Library is ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College’s Imaging and Computing Center.

Under construction since July 2006, the ³¦±ð²Ô³Ù±ð°ùÌýenhances ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ ability to teach visual presentation and interpretive skills that are nowadays as much the scientist’s preserve as the artist’s. Occupying Coram’s first floor, the center assembles high-tech gear — from optical microscopes to large-format printers to 20 powerful black-cased Dells in a computing lab — that enables students and faculty to capture, interpret and present in visual form all manner of information.

Because visual representations can include everything from digital art photos to genomic data, the center is seen, too, as an expression of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ dedication to teaching and learning across subject boundaries. “It’s a highly interdisciplinary, freewheeling environment,” says director Matt Côté, associate professor of chemistry.

The décor was designed to encourage hanging around and sharing ideas. Wall colors veer toward the bold, two Saeco vending machines offer espresso, chai and other benign stimulants, and the comfy lounge area is equipped for wireless network access. Three 46-inch Samsung flatscreens in the lounge show student and faculty work, and the facility is wired so that happenings in the imaging lab can be shared throughout the center.

For more information, call 207-753-6945 or e-mail center manager Mathieu Duvall.

A view of the new Commons with Pettengill in the background. (Doug Hubley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Dining Commons: Last Thursday, Paul Farnsworth left his office in Cutten Maintenance Center and headed toward the center of campus. On his way, he couldn’t miss the steel framework that, the day before, workers had begun for the new dining Commons.

“When I walked across the baseball field, I could see the building, and I thought, ‘Wow, that is going to be big,’ ” said Farnsworth, project manager for the Commons and related ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Walk projects. (See a campus map.)

Hoisting the steel beams into place is an 82-ton-capacity Link-Belt crane with a 180-foot combination jib and main boom, said Paul Burmeister, of the Maine steel fabricating firm Steel Guys. The rig, Burmeister said, won’t be pumping iron anywhere near its rated capacity, though. Most of the beams will weigh up to a ton and a half.

The steel frame works like “a giant Erector set,” added Farnsworth. “The pieces are precut and predrilled for bolting. The erectors just follow a numbered plan for assembly. The materials are even trucked in in a specific order.”

With the steel going up now for the Commons’ northeast corner, work on the southeast corner — future home to the Dining Services kitchen and “servery” area — starts next month. Then comes the northwest, in late February or early March, and the southwest in mid- to late March. Work on the exterior walls is expected to begin in April.

Wooden roof trusses being hoisted into place at 280 College St. (Doug Hubley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

New student housing: On Jan. 18, workers on the new student housing near Mount David began setting wooden roof trusses in place. The 130 trusses will support the inboard roof sections on the facility’s two “flankers,” or wings.

Curious about the tripartite nature of the new building, we asked project manager Pam Wichroski why architects Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott had designed a center core flanked by two, er, flankers.

“You need a fair amount of surface area on a building like this to maximize the daylight and exposure of student rooms to the outdoors,” she said. “It also helps with natural ventilation — we’re not trying to ventilate one large rectangle.”

In an arrangement strangely reminiscent of the original starship Enterprise, two midair breezeways called “bridges” will link the flankers and center section. These two-level bridges will connect the flankers’ and the core’s second and third floors.

The bridges will help bring spring breezes and daylight into the dorm, Wichroski said. Their walls will be glass — specifically, wood-framed awning windows. Informal gathering spaces will be situated at the flanker ends of both bridges, and the walkways themselves will be carpeted for social as well as aesthetic reasons.

Hanging steel for the new Commons. (Doug Hubley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“The student culture here is, they like to sit in the hallways or other common open spaces,” Wichroski said. “So we put carpet in so they could sit on the floor and treat it like a lot of other hallways in our dorms.”

Notes from underground: On the utilities front, work continues on a campuswide stormwater drainage system that reaches from the new ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Walk clear across Central Avenue over to Merrill Gym and the maintenance center. At a site behind the gym, trees were cleared and the college’s compost storage dumps were removed to make way for excavation, under way now, to accommodate the drainage works.

Ultimately, says Farnsworth, a new parking lot will be placed behind the gym. The lot will restore all the parking to be lost as Andrews Road is transformed into the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Walk — plus a net gain of 20 much-needed spaces.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ staff positions related to biomedical research.

Other benefits to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,” 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.