Image of Research Results (2026) – Still Image

Punk as a philosophy pulls ideas from disparate sources: mutual aid and skill sharing from anarchist philosophies, warping media representation, and style from whoever they wanted all wrapped up in a do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude. I want to better understand punk within academia and curricular research today. While justification and use of punk within academic spaces beyond musicology has begun, it is in its infancy. Currently, we are the Sweet Children to tomorrow’s Green Day; we have just started to explore. Punk, while not new itself, occupies a growing academic area with wide-reach and insight. Punk as pedagogy comes from a place of driving passion and learning. As an academic positionality, punk is more nebulous. Punk is a collection of experiences, it can be purposely elusive. However, there are consistent, grounding ideals and philosophy that guide punk. As punk itself exists as more than music, my research exists as more than writing. My exploration of punk as position within education is driven by exploration through art and my experience with punk communities. This image is one of four in a series of paintings created after a month-long daily drawing and research exercise.

Back to School in Chicago is a digital art piece representing the streets of Chicago. It shows the street having been overtaken by National Guards, which was in response to the president of the United States ‘declaring’ a war over Chicago over during the back-to-school season in 2025. The declaration President Trump had called “Operation Midway Blitz” showcased the bombardment of military personnel cracking down across many cities of the United States.

The piece represents my research of current events through the lens of graphic illustrations and political cartoons, as art and design has always reflected the history of its time.

The artwork was created through Procreate on iPad.

Suspended in death, this spider cadaver marks the final stage of a newly discovered “zombie fungus,” Gibellula floridensis, a species endemic to the neotropical regions of Florida. After infecting its host, we speculate the fungus manipulates the spider’s behavior, compelling it to climb and remain fixed in elevated, stable locations where spore dispersal is maximized, a phenomenon known as “summit disease.” Anchored in these exposed niches, the spider’s body becomes a launch point from which the fungus releases spores onto unsuspecting hosts below, perpetuating the infection cycle.

Captured during field collections in north-central Florida and later confirmed through molecular analyses in the lab, this specimen represents a species previously unknown to science. My research at the University of Illinois Chicago focuses on insect- and spider-associated fungi and the hidden ecological roles they play in natural ecosystems, particularly how these organisms influence host behavior, biodiversity, and disease dynamics. Beyond documenting a new organism, this image reveals a rarely seen interaction in which death fuels life, highlighting the eerie beauty, ecological importance, and unsettling power of zombie fungi operating enigmatically in the wild.

Eating Your Host: Fungal Diseases of Cicadas by Esther Tirmizi

The historic dual emergence of two periodical cicada broods in 2024 brought millions of screaming cicadas to the treetops of Illinois, creating a once-in-a-lifetime ecological phenomenon. However, nature rarely leaves such an abundance unclaimed. As the cicadas flooded the canopy, they became a vast resource for predators and parasites. This image captures the darker side of these emergences: a periodical cicada overtaken by Beauveria bassiana, a fungal pathogen vectored by the soil from which the cicadas emerge.

While the noise of the cicadas often dominates the headlines, a quieter war is waged in the trees. My research focuses on isolating and characterizing the fungal pathogens of periodical cicadas, unraveling the world of insect-fungal interactions and fungal biodiversity.

Nature’s True Colors by Yahya Najjar

Even in darkness, a newly germinated seed pushes out a leaf that is merely one millimeter in size, making over 500 natural chemicals to prepare it for the rigors of life, including the sun’s radiation, heat, cold, and many other environmental signals. Yet we don’t understand the roles of many of these chemicals, so I use seeds with known mutations to study their functions. I imaged a 2-day-old leaf of the ferulate 5-hydroxylase 1 (fah-1) mutant of Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) after it was exposed to the light for one day. When young, normal plants grow in the dark, they expand but remain pale with few pigments. As light shines through the thin, soft surface of the young leaf, it awakens its soul, bursting with color. When stressed, plants produce and release a myriad of stored chemicals that act as protectant pigments. However, mutant plants like fah-1 are unable to protect themselves as effectively; instead, they are stressed, and their cells begin to deteriorate. When light shines on the structures that contain these chemicals, they naturally fluoresce, bursting with color (indicating stress). Ironically, in its final moments, nature shows us its true colors. This image was captured using a Zeiss deconvolution microscope (Observer Z.1 Excite 120LED). UV, blue-green, and red LEDs were directed at the live leaf for less than a second, fluorescent emission was captured, and then the data were merged to obtain the final image. Shown is the young leaf that contains immature chloroplasts and the induced stress chemicals (blue-green).

Sound System Letterforms by Lele Buonerba

During my first semester in the Master of Design program in Graphic Design at UIC, I investigated sound systems, intended both as electrical equipment for the reproduction and amplification of sound and as concert, festival, and club PAs. I am particularly interested in Jamaican sound system culture, where mobile, temporary architectures shape social space.

DIY construction, informal plan sharing, and modular design are central to this culture. For an experimental design project, I translated these practices into typographic form by constructing letterforms from components typical of sound systems. The project began with collages from two-dimensional illustrations and developed through digital and physical processes, moving between 3D modeling, digital assembly, 3D printing, and photography.

Working with 1:18-scale speaker elements—some up to three inches tall—I approached typography as modular construction, similar to building with blocks. Fixed proportions and functional constraints made conventional letterforms impossible, encouraging experimentation, improvisation, and structural play. The resulting forms explore “impossible” architectures, echoing early digital typography designed for low-resolution displays.

The submitted image presents a lowercase a, composed of bass, midrange, and tweeter cabinets in white, orange, and blue PLA, precariously assembled with tape. The form functions simultaneously as typography, sculpture, and speculative sound infrastructure.

The Same Word by Nitheesh Mannava

Millions type Telugu in Latin script daily, on WhatsApp, Twitter, in search bars. When digital communication arrived, digital support for Telugu script lagged behind. People adapted by typing their language in Latin letters. This Latin-written Telugu is also often associated with Tenglish, a variety of Telugu that replaces native technical vocabulary with English words, Tenglish is commonly used by educated speakers. Telugu speakers are also commonly educated in English due to the British colonial rule and the emergence of English as the global language which is also commonly percieved in Telugu society as a symbol of upward mobility.
This visualization emerges from our NLP research developing morphology-aware canonicalization tools that recognize Telugu regardless of script. By understanding how Telugu builds words, its agglutinative suffixes, elision rules, phonetic patterns, we match identical words across scripts and spelling variations without using deep learning or heavy algorithms, bridging what standard text processing treats as separate.

The image renders 30,000 Telugu-transliteration word pairs as a text block, each word shadowed by its cross-script twin. Computational thread art traces అ, the first letter of the Telugu alphabet, through connections between word positions. In Telugu society, children begin education with this letter, believed to be the origin of all sounds. It represents Telugu identity itself. Here it emerges from the relationship between scripts, formed by thousands of threads connecting word pairs.

Tenglish also creates a smooth bridge: two sets of naturally aligned parallel data, Telugu-Tenglish and Tenglish-English, enabling cross-script retrieval and improved transliteration for a language often overlooked in NLP research.

Tracing Copper at Its Source: Geological Origins of Ancient Andean Metallurgy by Maria Isabel Guevara Duque

This image anchors my dissertation research in the physical landscape, highlighting relationships between natural resources, technological practice, and social life in the ancient Andes. Taken during geological fieldwork, the photograph documents the collection of copper-bearing minerals from an underground mine tunnel in Nambija, Zamora Chinchipe, Ecuador. The vivid green and blue mineralization along the tunnel wall, produced by secondary copper minerals such as malachite and azurite, signals the presence of copper-rich ore bodies like those exploited by ancient metallurgists.

The sampling shown here was conducted by Juver Jativa, MSc, local geologist and project collaborator, and represents an essential step in tracing the life history of copper from geological formation to finished artifact. My dissertation examines how copper was sourced, transformed, and circulated in Ecuador between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, a period when metals played central roles in social, political, and ritual life across the Andes. By analyzing geological samples alongside archaeological metal artifacts using techniques such as lead isotope analysis, I investigate whether ancient Ecuadorian societies relied on local copper sources or participated in long-distance exchange networks.

All sampling was conducted through ethical, collaborative partnerships with Ecuadorian institutions, and research results will be shared with local researchers and museums.

Visualizing the Heavy Residues of the Fusion of Neon and Carbon by David Neto

Nuclear astrophysics is the study of the nuclear processes that occur in the universe. One such example is the fusion of heavy ions, such as neon and carbon, in the crusts of neutron stars. Here are shown traces from an experiment to measure the fusion of neon and carbon, in this case, by detecting the products that result from these fusion reactions. The top set of traces shows a visualization of experimental data from the Argonne active-target ionization chamber MUSIC. The bottom set of traces shows a visualization of the same experimental events using machine learning methods. The traces in each set have been color-coded using a neural network classifier, with red indicating heavy residues close to sulfur and blue indicating heavy residues close to sodium. The development and implementation of machine learning methods for analyzing these active target heavy ion fusion experiments, as in the example here, could both speed up the analysis of the data and allow experimentalists to extract additional information from these experiments that is not easily obtainable using more traditional “by-hand” analysis methods.