Bridging Scientific Gaps
Meet art/biology major Adela Reuter.
Hometown: Fairbanks, Alaska
Thesis advisers: Professor Drew Anderson [biology] and Professor Juniper Harrower [art]
Thesis: “Always Already”
What it’s about: Bridging the gap between science and the way in which science is disseminated and experienced by the public.
What it’s really about: How it’s really hard to extract science from its cultural context. I have made a whole art show that is reflecting on that. And a mating experiment with fish. It’s also a lot about the value we ascribe to things. Art is something that you only get to pursue as a treat. It’s not really valued as a practice.
In high school: I was really high achieving, but extremely dysfunctional. I was the kid in high school who your parents would tell you not to hang out with. That’s not really a fun answer, but it’s true.
Influential professor: Professor Daniel Duford [art]. He changed the way that I think about everything. One day in a figure-drawing class, he gave us a reading from a book about Neanderthals, about how tiny little bone fragments show so much about how an individual lived. Daniel was talking about how the act of looking, the act of seeing the person you’re painting a portrait of is an act of letting that person’s existence speak to you. That was mind blowing.
Influential books: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender by David Getsy and The Promise of Happiness by Sarah Ahmed.
Challenges faced: My freshmen class was 2020-21. We were the first class during the COVID-19 pandemic. That experience was really sad. I feel really happy looking at everything cool that’s happening on campus now. Like, wow, look at people engaging with each other.
Concept that blew my mind: In Professor Keith Karoly [biology]’s plant evolution class, we studied how, basically, plants are evidence that the species concept isn’t real. Species is something that we say to make ourselves feel better. Species don’t really exist the way we think they exist. That’s my favorite thing: When scientists are like, “Wait, we did it weird, and now it’s philosophy instead of science.” Yeah! You got got!
Financial aid: Frances B. Huston, Norton Simon, and Dr. Henry I. Akiyama & Grace T. Ebihara Akiyama scholarships.
Outside the classroom: I worked as a field technician doing plant diversity surveys and collecting samples for a long-term research project in the summers to help pay for my college expenses.
What’s next? I think that’s a terrible question.