Give her a big hand: Joubert wins illustration prize

Human Hand Controlling Bacterial Biofilms, by Lydia-Marie Joubert, won the People's Choice Award in the illustration category of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Lydia-Marie Joubert, PhD, an electron microscopist and senior scientist at the medical school's Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine, won the People's Choice Award in the illustration category of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Her illustration — a hand covered with Pseudomonas bacteria — is titled Human Hand Controlling Bacterial Biofilms. It began as a photograph, as the journal Science explains in its latest issue: "While attending a conference at Gregynog Hall in Wales, Joubert photographed a 1.5-meter-high human hand that reaches out of the soil in the hall's gardens, sculpted by British artist Francis Hewlett. Then she overlaid micrographs of cultured biofilms, which had been stained with molecular probes to indicate the health of the cells. Those colored green are resistant to antimicrobial treatment — only a rare few are red, indicating that they have been vanquished."