Rosalind Franklin

Feature illustration I did for New Scientist’s Women in Science issue in my Editorial Illustration class with creative direction by Jay Dart.

The illustration is a portrait of Rosalind Franklin, an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.

Rosalind Franklin always liked facts. She was logical and precise, and impatient with things that were otherwise. She decided to become a scientist when she was 15. She passed the examination for admission to Cambridge University in 1938, and it sparked a family crisis. However, Rosalind was quick, intense, passionate, assertive, and directly confrontational, which is the way I wanted to portray her in this piece. Rosalind died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37.