broader impacts

Science comics

Comic strips and graphic novels are great science communication tools because they tell stories, create emotional connections, and break concepts down into easily digestible pieces.

Neuroscience is an ideal fit for conveying science through art because of people’s natural curiosity about the brain.

Art can depict brain anatomy and connections and help simplify complex, abstract concepts by grounding them in the real world, allowing for wider engagement with our field.

My aim is to make science and research findings more accessible, particularly computational neuroscience. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Mindlin Foundation, I am collaborating with visual artists and science communicators to create comics that can reach audiences that are often overlooked by traditional scientific outlets. Our ‘comic abstracts’ are jargon-free and visually appealing versions of peer-reviewed papers, making the concepts clear and easy to grasp. We also will integrate this style into a peer-reviewed review article that is both technical for an expert audience and general for a public audience, thus generating a resource for a broad range of readers.

A stylized illustration of Dr. Kanaka Rajan holding a yellow Lego block on her finger, surrounded by floating blocks, painted hands, and pink bubbles.
The Transmitter
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How neuroscience comics add KA-POW! to the field: Q&A with Kanaka Rajan

Comic of Dr. Rajan explaining how computations within the brain require activity across multiple, interacting neural networks and how this "network of networks" must be represented in artificial models.
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Comic of Dr. Rajan explaining how computations within the brain require activity across multiple, interacting neural networks and how this "network of networks" must be represented in artificial models.
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A light blue and teal comic about how art, specifically comics, can be a tool to make computational neuroscience more accessible and inclusive.
A comic by Dr. Kanaka Rajn explaining her work as a computational theorist to understand the different timescales of brain function.
A comic explaining what a “multiregional model” of the brain is and why that matters to understand how the brain interacts with itself across different brain areas.
Comic of Dr. Rajan explaining how computations within the brain require activity across multiple, interacting neural networks and how this "network of networks" must be represented in artificial models.

Collaborators

Matteo Farinella
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Jordan Collver
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Jorge Cham
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Stellate Communications
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