Science as Art

Competition at the 2025 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit

Viewing and Voting
Tuesday, April 8 | 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Wednesday, April 9 | 11:00 am - 7:00 pm
Summit, Level 2, Flex Hall

The Science as Art Competition is open to all registered 2025 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit attendees. Finalists' entries will be on display in the Summit Convention Center - Seattle. Multiple first-place and second-place awards of $400 and $200, respectively, will be presented to the winning entries at the meeting.

Winners announcement: Thursday, April 10 at 10:15 am in the Summit, Level 2, Flex AB.

As a special feature of MRS meetings, we offer the popular Science as Art competitions with entry open to all registered meeting attendees.

Visualization methods provide an important tool in materials science for the analysis and presentation of scientific work. Images can often convey information in a way that tables of data or equations cannot match. Occasionally, scientific images transcend their role as a medium for transmitting information and contain the aesthetic qualities that transform them into objects of beauty and art.

The galleries below represent some of the best entries from past meetings. Copyright for these images belongs to the Materials Research Society. To request permission to reuse the images, please contact us here.

2025 MRS Spring Science as Art Competition

Deadline to submit your artwork was February 25, 2025 at 11:59 pm ET

Competition Rules

You must be a registered attendee of the 2025 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit and be on site at the meeting to participate. You cannot designate another person to show your artwork for you.
Submissions are limited to one image per contestant and should complement the "science" component of the meeting. Multiple submissions by a single contestant will be disqualified.
Images may be obtained by any material imaging technique. They can also be the result of modeling and simulation or can be obtained by combining multiple images into one artistic image. Because the focus is on art, the aesthetic rather than scientific quality of the image is the key element in the competition. Nevertheless, the images must have some connection to materials science.
All images are to be submitted online at (INSERT LINK) as a high resolution .jpg file of at least 300 dpi (10MB maximum size) on or before February 24, 2025 at 11:59 pm ET.

Please include the submitter's last name in the title of the .jpg file.
The Meeting Chairs will select a group of finalists from these submissions and will notify all entrants of their status by March 7. Finalists will then bring their entries to the Spring meeting ready for judging and general display.

Format: All submitted images must include a short description of the technique used, the object that was imaged and any special conditions. If selected as a finalist, the image and caption should be made ready for mounting at the meeting. Detailed printing and mounting details will be sent to the finalists once selected.
Judging: The meeting attendees will independently determine first and second place selections via voting ballots. First-place Science as Art works will be awarded $400 prizes by the Chairs at the meeting. Second-place prizes of $200 each will also be awarded. Each entry is eligible for only one prize.

Please contact scienceasart@mrs.org with any questions regarding your submission.