Coming from neuroscience background in college, Michelle Lehman has always considered herself a science-minded person, but an artist at heart. “Everybody was interested in biomolecular interactions in neuroscience classes, and I liked looking at neurons because I thought they were pretty,” she jokes.
Now, as a senior marketing specialist at scientific instrument manufacturer Quantum Design, she meshes her passion for art with her scientific background.
It started when she took a 3D animation class in her third year at Middlebury College to fulfill an art requirement.
“I had way too much fun with it,” she says, “I was like ‘Oh, this is so cool,’ and started thinking about how I could utilize that tool as a way to help with science communication.”
Lehman began animating the research of professors as independent study, her work being presented at many a scientific conference. “This one professor ended up projecting my face at the end of her presentation,” she recalls, “and then a bunch of people came up to her afterwards and were like, ‘We’d like to connect with Michelle.’”
Upon the completion of her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience, Lehman took a job as Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s first-ever in-house animator, where she animated everything from COVID-19 drug therapy imagery to data visualizations for a 10-year initiative of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory exposed Lehman to a great breadth of science, from environmental research and energy technologies to materials and neutron science. Beneath them all lay the principles of physics, which one could say Lehman found by fate in order to connect her experiences at a fundamental level.
“My dad, growing up, would buy these crazy textbooks,” she says. “He would just talk physics. He loved it. He thought it was so philosophical and beautiful. I would sit as a little girl on his bed, and we’d be talking about physics and planetary systems and astronomy.” She says there is something beautiful about physics, and that she would have stumbled into it one way, or another.
“I know how to talk to researchers and talk to scientists, and so I know how to extract the information that I’m interested in getting,” Lehman reflects upon shifting from neuroscience into physics. Even though her technical background is a bit different from her peers, “the reality of working within this space is that you don’t need to understand everything because you can rely on your colleagues. My space is more within marketing and communications, and so I only need to understand what I need to understand to do my job.”
For four years, Lehman worked as an animation and video specialist at Quantum Design and is now charting a new course as the company’s senior marketing specialist. She is currently supporting the UK and Ireland team in scaling Quantum Perspectives, a digital magazine they developed to celebrate research performed with Quantum Design instruments across academia and industry, globally.
“Quantum Perspectives is a way to humanize everything that we’re doing to really demonstrate the impact that our systems are having on the world,” Lehman says. Since Quantum Design primarily created products for laboratory scientists, seeing the real impact of the company is sometimes not immediately apparent. “It’s a lot of feel-good content.”