Swimming Lessons is a spinoff of Six Questions with SWMS, a series of interviews with women across marine science with a wide range of career paths, degrees, and experiences.
By Gabi Serrato Marks
Between preparing to defend her master’s thesis, giving award-winning public lectures, and making accurate illustrations of oysters, Lauren Huey is certainly busy. When I found out that she was the artist behind the CERF 2017 Snapchat geofilter, I reached out to her about her art, research, and career plans.
Huey is a master’s candidate and self-described “oyster enthusiast” at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). She uses her scientific knowledge to inform her art, which often focuses on marine life. She received a Virginia Sea Grant graduate research fellowship that funds her research, stipend, and tuition. The fellowship also required her to have an outreach plan, which worked well with her art interests. She decided to make infographics and digital images of different species and put them into a free image library. “I am lucky that I am in a program that encourages me to do art as well as science,” Lauren told me. “My advisor knows that I have to be making these infographics, and when I give talks or design posters, I am able to use a lot of things I made.”
She also does some freelance illustration for other scientists’ research. “The biggest need that I have seen is for illustrations of a specific species. In scientific work, [the illustration] isn’t just a shrimp or a crab, it is a specific species that needs to look accurate.” That’s where Huey’s research skills come in handy, but she didn’t always want to focus on marine life. She started her undergraduate career as an animal science major, not a marine scientist.
“My family enjoys the ocean and I spent a lot of time on the beach as a kid. My older sister majored in marine biology, but I wanted to do something different than her,” she said. She couldn’t stay away from marine science for long, and she ended up changing her major to marine biology. When she immersed herself in marine biology, she received some push back. “A lot of people told me it wasn’t the best way to get a job, and I wouldn’t make a lot of money. But ultimately, I was more passionate about marine biology than animal science.”
That passion shows in her willingness to participate in tons of outreach activities, both online and in person. “One of the things I was most excited about this past year is that I got tweeted at in French, which meant that I was reaching people in other countries, to the point where I had to use google translate to communicate!” Huey likes using her illustrations to connect with people, especially because art is a universal language. She hosts events where kids color in barnacles and crabs to teach them about the habitats that oysters provide.
Events like those have made her want to pursue a career in science communication, not research. “My ultimate goal is to change the way that scientists interact with the public. I want to help shatter the “egghead” stereotype about us,” she told me. She wants to find a career that allows her to give scientists the tools we need to get our points across. “The research we do is so important, but it can be hard to communicate it.”
Huey’s illustrations are both accurate and beautiful, so chances are high that you will be seeing them in upcoming research papers, posters, and activities!