Category: People

Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist and designer. Her academic trajectory started with a Bachelors in Computer Science, followed by a Master’s in Plant Biology (both from UT Austin) and a PhD in Bioinformatics from the The University of Barcelona.

At the center of her research is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals to projects with landscape architects, to working as an artist in environments from SVA to the MIT Media Lab. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. Some recent highlights include the design for the bioremediation of a local toxic Superfund site which won a design competition, had a gallery exhibit, and a scientific publication. Her work with the MIT Media Lab led to the development of a novel approach to urban microbiome sampling using honeybees, an exhibit at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and a curriculum for international workshops. She has consistently made the tools – software, wetware, hardware – needed to answer her research questions.

She currently holds an Assistant Professor position in the Integrated Digital Media department at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in New York
City.

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Tega Brain is an artist, researcher, and educator whose work spans critical art, computational design, and environmental engineering. Through practice-led research, she creates experimental systems and technologies that probe data practices and their politics, and that provoke new ways to imagine and design our ecology. Tega Brain is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose work spans critical art, computational design, and environmental engineering. She develops experimental systems that embody and probe alternative visions for ecology – what she calls ‘eccentric engineering’. Her recent work focuses on feminist data practices that include environmental sensing and modeling, artificial and natural intelligence, and low carbon digital design. Brain is the co-author of the book Code as Creative Medium (MIT Press 2020) which is a handbook for teaching and learning creative practice in the medium of software. Her work as an educator focuses on computation as a medium for teaching art and design, as well as art and design as a means and context for teaching computation. She also contributes to open-source programming tool kits for the arts.

(MA, Queensland University of Technology)
Assistant Industry Professor, Integrated Digital Media
Technology, Culture and Society
brain@nyu.edu

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