Eve Moll is an undergraduate senior at Vanderbilt University. She found her passion for art as a child. Growing up, Moll always had a pencil in hand. Through middle and high school, she took art classes at Lucy Saenz Art Studio in Pembroke Pines, Florida. Lucy trained her in pencil and oil paint using a regimen designed to teach proportion, light, and color. It took years for Moll to graduate from Lucy’s technique-building exercises, and she’s since been developing her artistic voice. Moll considers herself a figurative oil painter focused on human subjects, but still frequently uses pencils and other media in her work. She has sold her art at charity functions nationwide and has even dabbled in live painting.

 

Moll is also an eager biology student. She is double-majoring in Cellular & Molecular Biology and Communication of Science and Technology. She has participated in research in two fields. First, she has conducted biomedical research as a research student in the Sweatt lab, a neurobiology lab at Vanderbilt. Second, she has conducted clinical research as a research volunteer for Setting Scoliosis Straight, which supports the Harms Study Group, an international spinal deformity research group. Moll relishes seeing science-concepts come to life and learning new biological concepts.

 

Moll also enjoys exploring both art and science in tandem. She fuses her two passions through ArtLab, a program at Vanderbilt that explores the intersection of art and science. Through ArtLab, she’s created and shown artwork inspired by various science concepts to include epigenetics, immunology, medical imaging technologies, women in STEM, and more. Moll describes her artistic process as, “a lot of brainstorming upfront, then executing a well-thought-out image leaving some room for mistakes and surprises along the way.” She’s found that her process is consistent, and she employs this process in ArtLab projects and otherwise. Moll’s style, however, has adapted considerably to accommodate science-related topics. Her artistic style in the past has been extremely true to life. She used to measure how good her paintings were by how photographic they looked. But, as Moll points out, for many minute biological process, there is no photograph. These biological processes occur in a tiny, unknown world—almost an alternate universe. This allows her to become far more abstract and colorful in her renderings. Moll says she is free to get far more creative and leave more to the imagination when creating art-science.

 

In the Artist-in-Residence program, Moll was paired with the Lacy Lab to generate art inspired by the binary toxin of Clostridium difficile, a bacteria responsible for hospital-acquired infection in the United States. The binary toxin (CDT) has two proteins, CDTa and CDTb. CDTb forms a pore in a host cell, and the formation of this pore is the subject of exploration. The pore “zippers up” and injects itself syringe-style into the host cell membrane. Moll sought to capture this movement, and portrayed the transition of CDTb from pre-pore to pore state in an imaginative and visually-appealing way. Moll was incredibly grateful to work with mentors in the Lacy lab, who she says were enormously helpful in guiding the direction of the image and narrowing its focus. She celebrates that the Artist-in-Residence program recognizes scientists’ need for art, especially when seeking to engage a broad audience through a publication. Moll also notes that this program gives young artists like herself a platform to make and show art, a mentorship structure, and a reason to explore a scientific topic she otherwise may not have.