Finding the harmony within art and science

Excerpt from from UMBC News: Finding The Harmony Within Art And Science - UMBC: University Of Maryland, Baltimore County

---

At UMBC, undergraduate students are redefining the boundaries of scientific and artistic pursuits. From a chemical engineer who graces the stage with his cello to a bioinformatician who paints and a biochemist who ignites the dance floor with Latin rhythms, these scholars thrive in an environment that celebrates their diverse passions.

This spring, several U-RISE Scholars—NIH’s Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement—shared their multidisciplinary interests with their U-RISE advisors. As a result, the advisors started asking how the arts and science blend in these students’ lives, and presented the findings at an academic conference this spring. What they learned was that here, rigorous research and creative expression intertwine, fostering a vibrant community where students explore every dimension of their talents.

For Joshua Dayie, a senior chemical engineering major, both discipline and creativity are required for his research and his art—playing the cello. “You really have to strike a balance between them to make any meaningful progress,” he says. Practicing cello requires hours of repetition, until technical passages flow out of his fingers from muscle memory alone. In the lab, sometimes experiments must be repeated many times before they’re successful—that’s the discipline. 

Playing the cello and conducting research makes Joshua Dayie feel “more whole.” (Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17/UMBC)

Dayie applies that discipline to his research with Mark Marten, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, on characterizing signaling pathways in fungi that activate in response to environmental stressors.

Then comes the creativity. Only after someone masters the fundamentals can they explore nuance in the tone or emotion conveyed on the cello, Dayie says. Similarly, in science “a lot of the innovation that you generate is really only meaningful after you’ve spent a lot of time understanding the core scientific concepts behind everything.”

“I think that’s been the most surprising thing: The creativity that comes from a very sound foundation of discipline is something that is translatable pretty much anywhere,” Dayie reflects. 

As an added bonus, “Music has been a really nice outlet for me to use a different part of my brain, just to express myself in a different way,” he adds. “I feel like it makes me a little bit more whole.”

---