Felice Frankel at the Cambridge Public Library

Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Felice Frankel—award-winning science photographer and research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering—for a discussion of her first book for young adults, Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science Around Us. She will be joined in conversation by Melissa Franklin—the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University.

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Phenomenal Moments and pick it up at the event. Felice Frankel will sign copies of her book after the presentation.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

Visual learners rejoice! A world-renowned photographer imagines the intersection of art, science, and the ordinary-extraordinary world around us in a stunning work of interactive nonfiction.
Enlisting readers to “be the scientist” through vivid fine-art photographs, internationally acclaimed science photographer Felice Frankel zooms in and out on beautiful and brilliant moments all around us to reveal the chemical, natural, or physical processes—from viscosity and venation to chlorophyll and capillary action—behind scientific phenomena. Organized into five thematic sections that explore light and shadow, form, surfaces, traces left behind, and transformation, this ingenious book is both a visual feast to savor in its own right and a guessing game that trains readers to look in a more layered, curious, and questioning way. Close-up spreads offer abstract clues to phenomena revealed at the page turn. Full-color images of similar scientific “moments” broaden context. Sophisticated and inspiring, this invitation to engage with and understand our surroundings—the worlds we can see and the worlds we can’t—is a ticket to everyday wonder.

Felice C. Frankel is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering with additional support from Mechanical Engineering. She joined MIT in 1994. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was previously a senior research fellow in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Initiative for Innovative Computing and a visiting scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology. She’s the author of six books of science photography, including Picturing Science and Engineering. She has been covered in Nature, Science, Physics Today, National Geographic, and other science media. This is her first book for young readers. She lives Massachusetts.

Melissa Franklin is an experimental particle physicist who studies proton-proton collisions produced by Large Hadron Collider(LHC). She is a collaborator on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC where she works in collaboration with over 3000 physicists. Franklin was co-discoverer of the top quark and the Higgs boson. She is presently studying the properties of the Higgs boson and searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Professor Franklin, born and raised in Canada, received her B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and her Doctorate from Stanford University. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Champagne/Urbana and was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, before joining the Harvard faculty in 1989. In 1992 she became the first woman to receive tenure in the Physics department and she served as Chair of the Physics department from 2010-2014.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, United States

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