A day in the life of … a brain imaging scientist and an audio-visual artist

Technology is revolutionising medicine with potential impacts for all of our lives. But how much do we understand the developments shaping the future of healthcare?

Carlos Cueto Mondejar from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging is developing faster, cheaper and safer ways to image the brain using ultrasound that could be made available to first responders to a major incident. Last year he began working with Melanie King, a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art and co-Director of super/collider, an independent creative agency that explores science from a pop cultural standpoint.

They were brought together for the Great Exhibition Road Festival as part of a public engagement project called ART X SCIENCE to artistically help the public make sense of research into new medical imaging technologies. Together they have produced ULTRA, a two-part composition made up of an interactive computer-generated piece and a soundtrack that converts Carlos’s brain scanning data into audio to allow you to listen to a journey through the brain.

At this talk we will find out a little more about Carlos and Melanie’s day jobs and daily challenges, how they got interested in the collaboration of science and art, and their ambitions for working together in the future.