See the winning 2026 Images of Research

1st place: "Educational Punk Positionality" By Steven M. Andresen

What are we looking at?
Punk philosophy combines ideas of mutual aid and skill-sharing from anarchist philosophies, warped media representation and style and a do-it-yourself attitude. While justification and use of punk within academic spaces beyond musicology has begun, it is in its infancy. Punk as pedagogy comes from a place of driving passion and learning. As an academic positionality, punk is more nebulous.

How did you make this image? My exploration of punk as position within education is driven by exploration through art and my experience with punk communities. This image is one of four in a series of paintings created after a month-long daily drawing and research exercise.

2nd place: "Back to School in Chicago"
By Sebastian Holt

What are we looking at? "Back to School in Chicago" shows the street overtaken by National Guards in response to President Trump's Operation Midway Blitz, which took place in Chicago just as schools were returning to session.

How did you make this image? I created it on Procreate on an iPad. The piece represents my research of current events through the lens of graphic illustrations and political cartoons, as art and design has always reflected the history of its time.

3rd place: "Zombie Spiders: The Living Dead of the Web."
By Mateo Valdiviezo

What are we looking at?
This spider cadaver marks the final stage of a newly discovered "zombie fungus," gibellula floridensis. After infecting its host, we speculate that the fungus manipulates the spider's behavior, compelling it to climb and remain fixed in elevated, stable locations where spore dispersal is maximized, a phenomenon known as "summit disease." Anchored in these exposed niches, the spider's body becomes a launch point from which the fungus releases spores onto unsuspecting hosts below, perpetuating the infection cycle.

How did you make this image?
My research at the University of Illinois Chicago focuses on insect- and spider-associated fungi and the ecological roles they play in natural ecosystems, particularly how these organisms influence host behavior, biodiversity and disease dynamics. This specimen was captured during field collections in north-central Florida.

"Eating Your Host: Fungal Diseases of Cicadas"
By Esther Tirmizi

What are we looking at?
The dual emergence of two periodical cicada broods in 2024 brought millions of screaming cicadas to the treetops of Illinois, creating a once-in-a-lifetime ecological phenomenon. As the cicadas flooded the canopy, they became a vast resource for predators and parasites. This image captures a periodical cicada overtaken by Beauveria bassiana, a fungal pathogen vectored by the soil from which the cicadas emerge.

How did you make this image?
My research focuses on isolating and characterizing the fungal pathogens of periodical cicadas, unraveling the world of insect-fungal interactions and fungal biodiversity.

"Tracing Copper at Its Source: Geological Origins of Ancient Andean Metallurgy"
By Maria Isabel Guevara Duque

What are we looking at?
Taken during my geological fieldwork, the photograph documents the collection of copper-bearing minerals from an underground mine tunnel in Nambija, Zamora Chinchipe, Ecuador. The vivid green and blue mineralization along the tunnel wall, produced by secondary copper minerals such as malachite and azurite, shows the presence of copper-rich ore bodies like those exploited by ancient metallurgists.

How did you make this image?
The sampling shown here was conducted by JuverJativa, MSc, local geologist and project collaborator. My dissertation examines how copper was sourced, transformed and circulated in Ecuador between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, a period when metals played central roles in social, political and ritual life across the Andes.

"Visualizing the Heavy Residues of the Fusion of Neon and Carbon"
By David Neto

What are we looking at?
Nuclear astrophysics is the study of the nuclear processes. One example is the fusion of heavy ions, such as neon and carbon, in the crusts of neutron stars. Here are shown traces from an experiment to measure the fusion of neon and carbon by detecting the products that result from that reaction. The top set of traces are a visualization of data from the Argonne National Laboratory active-target ionization chamber MUSIC. The bottom set shows the same experimental events using machine-learning methods.

How did you make this image?
The traces in each set have been color-coded using a neural network classifier: Red indicates heavy residues close to sulfur, and blue indicates heavy residues close to sodium. Using machine learning to analyze these active-target, heavy-ion fusion experiments could both speed up the analysis of the data and allow us to extract more information from these experiments than we could get using traditional "by-hand" analysis.

"The Same Word"
By Nitheesh Mannava

What are we looking at?
Millions of people in India type the Telugu language in Latin script every day - on WhatsApp, Twitter and in online searches. When digital communication arrived, digital support for Telugu script lagged. People adapted by typing Telugu in Latin letters. This Latin-written Telugu is often associated with Tenglish, a variety of Telugu that replaces native technical vocabulary with English words. This visualization emerges from our research to develop morphology-aware canonicalization tools that recognize Telugu regardless of the script it's written in. We have matched identical words across scripts and spelling variations, bridging what standard text processing treats as separate.

How did you make this image?
The image renders 30,000 Telugu-transliteration word pairs as a text block, each word shadowed by its cross-script twin. Computational thread art traces the first letter of the Telugu alphabet through connections between word positions. In Telugu society, children begin education with this letter, believed to be the origin of all sounds. It represents Telugu identity itself.

"Nature's True Colors"
By Yahya Najjar

What are we looking at?
A newly germinated seed pushes out a leaf that is merely 1 millimeter in size yet contains over 500 natural chemicals to prepare it for the rigors of life, like cold or the sun's radiation. Yet we don't understand the roles of many of these chemicals, so I use seeds with known mutations to study their functions. I imaged a two-day-old leaf of the ferulate 5-hydroxylase 1 mutant of arabidopsis thaliana after it was exposed to the light for one day. When stressed, plants produce and release their stored chemicals that act as protectant pigments. But mutant plants like fah-1 can't protect themselves as effectively; instead, when they are stressed, their cells begin to deteriorate. When light shines on the structures that contain these chemicals, they naturally fluoresce, bursting with color (indicating stress).

How did you make this image?
This image was captured using a Zeiss deconvolution microscope. UV, blue-green and red LEDs were directed at the live leaf for less than a second, fluorescent emission was captured and then the data were merged to obtain the final image.

"Sound System Letterforms"
By Lele Buonerba

What are we looking at?
I am interested in Jamaican sound-system culture, where mobile, temporary architectures shape social space. DIY construction, informal plan sharing and modular design are central to this culture. For an experimental design project, I translated these practices into typographic form by constructing letterforms from components typical of sound systems. This is a lowercase "a," composed of bass, midrange and tweeter cabinets in white, orange and blue, precariously assembled with tape. The form functions simultaneously as typography, sculpture and speculative sound infrastructure.

How did you make this image? The project began with collages from two-dimensional illustrations and developed through digital and physical processes, moving between 3D modeling, digital assembly, 3D printing and photography.

1st place: "Paper Imitations"
By Meghan Ferraro

What are we looking at?
I created this stop-motion animation short as a part of my research into the "Hidden Worlds: The Films of LAIKA" exhibit at the Museum of Pop Culture.

How did you make this image?
I used paper cut-outs of images from the exhibit to gain an understanding of both the process of stop-motion animation and how LAIKA is unique from other studios in the field. Production took about two months of planning, cutting, animating and editing to achieve a dynamic series of scenes that allowed me to experiment with different techniques.

2nd place: "Schwa: A Somatic Wearable for Breath-led Anxiety Regulation"
By Minoo Marasi

What are we looking at?
Schwa is a research-driven wearable device that explores how the body, rather than cognition, can regulate anxiety. Slow breathing is clinically proven to restore autonomic balance, yet many existing techniques rely on deliberate attention, often unavailable during acute stress. When activated, Schwa's slow oscillations invite the wearer's breath to entrain naturally.

How did you make this image?
The project draws from research in somatic psychology, affective neuroscience and human-computer interaction, which shows that anxiety is linked to disrupted breathing patterns and heightened sympathetic arousal. Inspired by the regulating mechanism of a therapeutic hug, where one person's steady breath subconsciously guides another's, Schwa uses gentle pneumatic inflation and deflation across the chest and diaphragm to provide a tangible respiratory rhythm.

3rd place: "When Air Meets Ground: Collaborative Robots for Surveillance"
By Mohammad Safwan Mondal

What are we looking at?
Drones are powerful tools for surveillance, but their limited battery life makes it difficult for them to operate for long periods. My research explores how this challenge can be addressed by enabling drones to work closely with robots on the ground. In this setup, an unmanned ground vehicle provides the drone with mobile recharging and coordination. The video shows an aerial and a ground robot working together during a surveillance task.

How did you make this image?
The two robots meet at designated locations to maintain continuous operation. Behind this visual demonstration is a coordinated planning and control approach that helps the robots decide where to move and when to recharge while adapting to changing conditions in the environment.

Honorable mention: "The States of Light"
By Klaudia Paulina Biskup

What are we looking at?
"The States of Light" explores presence, self-perception and impermanence through shifting light, mirrors and iridescent paper. The mirrors function as symbols of fragmented identity, reflecting the self in broken and shifting pieces. The iridescent paper reacts to light and movement, creating constantly changing surfaces that reinforce the idea of instability. Together, these elements create an atmospheric space in which the viewer becomes both an observer and a subject. This exploration invites the viewer to slow down and become more self-aware; the installation positions identity not as fixed but as continually forming and dissolving through perception and time.

How did you make this image?
My research focuses on impermanence in design, the idea that nothing is fixed and everything is in constant flux. For this installation, I worked with light, an energy that never remains the same. It continuously moves, transforms and responds to its environment.

Honorable mention: "VR Animal Embodiment"
By Naphatsorn Sakdaauscoskul

What are we looking at?
This video embodies the viewpoint of a baby Malayan tapir and is a prototype for the research title "The Effect of Animal Embodiment in Virtual Reality to Foster Empathy in Wildlife Conservation," conducted in UIC's biomedical visualization program. The aim is to determine whether using threat-laden storytelling and perspective-taking in VR animal character embodiment increases empathy, connectedness to nature and pro-environmental behavior. In the research experiment, participants will embody an African forest elephant, a critically endangered species, to experience the threats these animals face.

How did you make this image?
I created the video using Cinema 4D to model, rig and animate a baby Malayan tapir; Substance Painter for textures; Unity to build the virtual reality scene; and Adobe After Effects to create the end credits.