Recipient of Penny Fox Internship Fellowship

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

In the museum’s botanical department, botanical illustrator Alice Tangerini taught me the techniques of traditional botanical illustration and I illustrated a plant specimen. Additionally, I worked on digitizing a historic collection of cactus illustrations from a 100-year-old expedition, correcting the coloration, repairing damage, and cleaning up the images to be web-ready.

I also interned with Taina Litwak, the scientific illustrator for the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Systematic Entomology Lab. I illustrated Coleoptera (beetle) specimens from the museum’s collection, and was trained on a camera lucida, a microscope device that is a traditional tool of scientific illustration.