RIT Student Honored in International Photo Competition for Image Under the Microscope

Michael Franklin, a third-year biomedical photographic communications student at Rochester Institute of Technology and a native of Anchorage, Alaska, was among those honored in an international photo competition recognizing the world’s most extraordinary microscope images of life science specimens.

Franklin received an honorable mention in the Olympus Bioscapes Competition for her photograph of a cross section of a pine stem. It is a mapped image comprised of 60 individual images stitched together. Using a light microscope and a Zeiss digital camera designed specifically for photomicrography, Franklin implemented a microscopy technique called differential interference contrast.

“When I first found out that I won an award, I was shocked,” says Franklin. “The Bioscapes Competition is one of two international competitions in my field of imaging. Being honored for my work with masters in my field was a great feeling. I attended the awards ceremony in San Francisco and I made many great contacts. The people I met really inspired me to keep learning and working hard.”

She is currently working on self-publishing a book of her photographs. She hopes to have her book, Magnoliophyta: The Microscopic World of Flowering Plants, completed by the end of March.

Note: Rochester Institute of Technology is internationally recognized for academic leadership in computing, engineering, imaging technology, and fine and applied arts, in addition to unparalleled support services for students with hearing loss. Nearly 16,500 full- and part-time students are enrolled in more than 200 career-oriented and professional programs at RIT, and its cooperative education program is one of the oldest and largest in the nation.

For two decades, U.S. News & World Report has ranked RIT among the nation’s leading comprehensive universities. RIT is featured in The Princeton Review’s 2009 edition of The Best 368 Colleges and in Barron’s Best Buys in Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes RIT as a “Great College to Work For.”