Partnership program helps fund innovative collaboration between scientist and comic-book artist

Classrooms have changed a lot over the years. Heavy textbooks have been replaced by e-books. Binders of study materials have been ditched for AI-summarized study guides and notes. Students are losing their attention span for text-heavy materials and instead turning to abbreviated content and visuals to learn.

“They just read slides, notes. They don't read textbooks like we used to do. That's a big problem for the scientific community,” Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Assistant Professor Saurja DasGupta says. The solution to this problem, DasGupta points out, isn’t to continue doing things the way they’ve always been done, and hope students revert. Rather, it’s finding a new way to communicate science, both in classrooms and to the general public. This is where his collaborator Argha Manna comes in.

Manna is a cancer researcher turned comics artist. He is an artist-in-residence and faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar, where he co-leads the Curiosity Lab. He frequently collaborates with scientists to take their academic research and turn it into accessible and engaging graphic narratives. DasGupta and Manna first had the idea for a comic book about the origins of life, DasGupta’s primary research area, years ago when they first connected and realized how much their specialities aligned. “We are trying to understand how life emerged 4 billion years ago on the earth, and trying to recreate the conditions in the lab setting to make forms of artificial life, which I think benefits a lot from imagination and artistic representation,” DasGupta says.

The tricky part was finding the time and funding to make it happen. So when DasGupta received an email about the Asia Guest Scholar/Artist Partnership Program through Notre Dame Global, he eagerly applied. Once he received notice that he was selected for the grant, he reached out to Manna, and they hit the ground running.

They planned out a jam-packed month for Manna’s visit to Notre Dame. In addition to spending dedicated time completing a few chapters of the comic book, they organized a public lecture on campus, participated in a science and arts panel at a South Bend jazz venue, hosted a science comics workshop for students, and put on an exhibition in the Jordan Hall of Science displaying their work and that of the students in the workshop. Manna and DasGupta took their project out of town to San Diego, where they presented part of their graphic novel at the Annual Meeting of the RNA Society. They were invited speakers at a student-led panel on the role of art and design in science communication at Caltech. Throughout the month, the artist-scientist pair engaged people from all over the Notre Dame community and beyond—students, staff, faculty, and South Bend locals alike.

It’s not hard to see why their events and workshops garnered such large and diverse crowds. What they’re doing is trailblazing, exciting work. “This scientific idea of the origins of life has not been addressed in any sort of graphic novel format. There are only a few comic book artists that are dealing with scientific topics at this point in the world, and Argha is definitely the only one doing it at this level in India,” DasGupta shares.

Not only are DasGupta and Manna uniquely positioned to create this work, but Notre Dame makes an excellent host institution for it. “I feel like Notre Dame is generally interested in big questions, maybe because of its Catholic character. Notre Dame’s willingness to tackle profound questions that don’t have immediate answers is one of the things that attracted me to the University,” DasGupta explains. Because of how complex and vast the question of the origin of life is, DasGupta and Manna found it necessary that their approach to answering it be multidisciplinary. As a result, they used Manna’s time on campus to meet with Notre Dame faculty from various departments.

“All the objective science part is very recent, but the human race has been thinking about this problem since the time of Greeks. So it was obvious that we had to discuss with the practicing philosophers,” Manna says. “And we discussed with physicists, because as Carl Sagan says, ‘We all are stardust.’ All the living elements on the earth are stardust…they took part in life's beginning.” In addition to insights from faculty, Manna shares that the interest from students they interacted with was invaluable: “They really asked some good questions, which definitely will be helpful in writing our book in some future chapters.”

By the end of their time together, they completed and presented the first two chapters of their comic book. Both DasGupta and Manna were adamant that this would not have happened without collaboration and the funding to make that collaboration possible. “I know the science, he knows the art, we understand each other, and so we can really create something that is more than the sum of both of us,” DasGupta says.

The hope is that this is just the start—both to the comic book, which they anticipate will have at least five more chapters, and to encouraging more interest and organizing workshops on this topic. “Art engages the public, and especially something like comic art, which is considered to be playful,” DasGupta says. “If you can use that as a vehicle to put science through, I think it's a really powerful mode of transmission of scientific information.”

Interested in collaborating with an international colleague? Learn about funding opportunities like the Asia Guest Scholar/Artist Partnership Program on the NDG Grants and Funding webpage.