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Seeing how tissues move through space and time through virtual reality models and animations gives students a better grasp of how the body develops. Even in this captured frame, the red blood cells appear poised to tumble through a vessel.
Phillips built on this revelation when he began teaching embryology and tissue development at Bowdoin. He used animation to help students better understand how tissues move through space and time, not only to change shape but to position themselves to signal each other. Otherwise, "students had a difficult time visualizing that," he says.
Always innovating, Phillips now has a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to build virtual environments that allow students from any location to create online virtual reality models of Zen gardens, enabling others to log on and experience the spaces. 
Image: Courtesy of Carey Phillips
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Carey Phillips
Carey Phillips is in the process of translating his animation techniques to a larger scale. This past year, Phillips and collaborators at the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida received a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a visualization tool for the Human Brain Project. They plan to do magnetic-resonance-imaging scans of mama mouse throughout her pups' development, using motion sensor-type technology to track key points in their brains as they grow. The team will then apply the acquired data to build a threedimensional model of the developing mouse brain, ultimately allowing viewers to observe its tissue layers as they grow. "We will then use the same technology we developed for teaching," Phillips says, "creating tools allowing researchers to log their gene expression data and interactively visualize any combinations of spatial/temporal data stored in the database."
"The NIH award demonstrates very directly," Phillips says, "how innovations in teaching can be used in research, instead of always thinking about it the other way around."
Ultimately, Phillips plans to create a framework that would allow researchers to contribute new findings to the model of how genes, proteins, and other molecules interact in the developing brain. "We'll set up an interface so that people from anywhere in the world can enter their data," he says. "Ideally, it could become a national archive as well as a research tool."
Photo: David McLain
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