Natasha S Myers

Natasha Myers
Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology York University Toronto, Canada nmyers@yorku.ca York Website: http://www.arts.yorku.ca/anth/nmyers/ METALab

Areas of Interest

 * structural biology // biological engineering // molecular machines // anthropology and history of science // modeling, imaging and simulation // pedagogy // embodiment // tacit knowledge // gesture and affect // performance of scientific knowledge // ...

Description of Research

 * Natasha’s dissertation research explores the lively visual cultures of twenty-first-century structural biology and biological engineering, with a focus on pedagogy and training in the arts of molecular visualization. This ethnography examines the making of a new generation of life scientists and the formation of professional identities around novel three- and four-dimensional imaging, modeling and simulation techniques that can render living bodies visible at the molecular scale. As visualization practices change, she is observing the emergence of new modes of embodiment and biological imaginations, tracking how they propagate in pedagogical and professional contexts, including classrooms, teaching laboratories, research labs, and conferences. She examines how proteins are figured and continually reconfigured as simultaneously machinic and lively, looking at how the mechanisms of ‘molecular machines’ are conceptualized and performed through gestures and affects that scientists use to flesh-out, animate and relay their embodied knowledge of molecular forms and movements.

Publications

 * Myers, Natasha (2008) 'Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography', Social Studies of Science 38/2: 163-199.


 * Myers, Natasha (2007) 'Modeling Proteins, Making Scientists: An Ethnography of Pedagogy and Visual Cultures in Contemporary Structural Biology', Ph.D. Dissertation: History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.


 * Myers, Natasha (2006) 'Animating Mechanism: Animations and the Propagation of Affect in the Lively Arts of Protein Modeling', Science Studies 19/2: Special Issue on the Future of Feminist Technoscience: 6-30.


 * Myers, Natasha (2005) 'Visions for Embodiment in Technoscience', in Tripp, Peggy and Linda Muzzin (eds), Teaching as Activism: Equity Meets Environmentalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press): 255-67.


 * Myers, Natasha (forthcoming) 'Performing the Protein Fold', in Turkle, Sherry (ed), Simulation and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).


 * Myers, Natasha (forthcoming) 'Modeling Molecular Machines', in Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon (ed), NatureCultures: Thinking with Donna Haraway (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Current CV
Click here for pdf of current CV

Bodies in Time: Dance, Plants and Biological Visualization ...


Genetically modified Arabidopsis thaliana flower bud expressing green fluorescent protein, visualized under ultraviolet light. Micrograph by Natasha Myers