A little art, a little science

Professor's winning research photo of suspended droplets was inspired by a walk in the park. By Brian Caldwell Faculty of Engineering - A walk in the park provided inspiration for a striking photograph that earned national recognition this week for an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Zhao Pan was in a 500-year-old Beijing park in his native China after a sudden rainfall when he noticed huge drops of water hanging from the tips of leaves in cypress trees. "I play with droplets every day, but these were much larger than any I had seen in the lab," he recalls. "I was amazed by Mother Nature, so I decided to do some research into it." The net result was a 2018 study on how the angles at which fibres cross affect the volume of water droplets they can suspend, a piece of fundamental work motivated by pure curiosity. As part of the study, Pan spent a day in the lab meticulously planning and playing with lighting, colour, backgrounds and camera settings to produce an image illustrating the findings. All the effort paid off.