University Times

A collection of science-themed pillows designed for the conference suite/sitting area at the University Center for Biologic Imaging (CBI) made their debut as Science 2010’s Science as Art exhibit.

Most pillows in the display were created in response to an RFP (in this case, request for pillows) put out by Donna Beer Stolz, CBI associate director, and now are on display in the CBI suite in the Thomas E. Starzl Biomedical Science Tower.

A knitted pillow representing a dendritic cell (orange) interacting with a T-cell (blue) in the presence of bacteria (green), created by immunology professor Christine Milcarek.

Flanking the cell pillow is a pink spleen pillow created by CBI research specialist Doris Clay and a hepatic Doppler pillow created by Simona Nemcova, a vascular clinical and translational research sonographer at the UPMC Cardiovascular Institute. The pillow combines two images representing liver vasculature and the gall bladder in stripes to create the impression of pulsating ultrasound  waves.

A stuffed white rat pillow decorated with an appliqué depicting its internal organs. The pillow was  created by Cathy Rylander, an art teacher in Texas who is a friend of CBI research instructor Patricia Loughran.

A quilted pillow featuring a scanning electron microscope image of a carpenter ant, taken by cell biology and physiology staff member Jonathan Franks. The brightly colored pillow was created by Pitt-Titusville English faculty member Cindy Andes.