The Association of Medical Illustrators Annual Meeting

 

          
Samantha Reba
Junior Writer

The 68th Annual Meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) took place July 17-21 in Salt Lake City, Utah. As the premier conference on medical and scientific visualization, the annual AMI meeting brings together a diverse array of professionals engaged in promoting the power of visual media to advance understanding of the life sciences. Two of our esteemed medical illustrators, Mike Boasso and Satyen Tripathi, were able to travel out to the city to attend 4 days of the conference.

Among other things, this year’s conference, entitled “FUSION: Connecting Minds, Visualizing Science & Medicine,” consisted of daily workshops led by a host of highly regarded professionals. Satyen had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop led by Chris Converse, a multimedia designer and developer from the Philadelphia area.  Chris has been a featured speaker at HOW Design, AIGA, and Adobe MAX conferences, and has written and hosted a variety of training videos. The subject of the workshop that Satyen attended was Adobe Edge Animate, which is the newest addition to the Adobe family. The program combines Adobe and web standards with rich features that allow the user to design and animate every interactive experience.

Mike, who’s been attending AMI Annual Meetings for a decade, was able to grab a seat in the ZBrush® for Beginners workshop led by Wes Price, an associate professor of media arts and animation at the Art Institute of Colorado. Mr. Price’s workshop discussed the importance of ZBrush®, the prominent program that’s become a very powerful and useful tool in the field of biomedical visualization.

In addition to the workshops, a salon was created to showcase medical illustrations from across the country. The artwork remained on display for the entirety of the conference.

More than 300 professionals turned out for the meeting. Speakers included: Roberta Ness, MD, MPH, Dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health; Jens Krüger, PhD , Chair of the High Performance Computing Graphics & Visualization group at the University of Duisburg-Essen; Frederic Hellman, MD, Delaware County Medical Examiner; Peleg Top, Marketing Strategist; Carlos Machado, MD, Physician/Illustrator at Ciba-Geigy/Novartis; and Carl Zimmer, Author.

The 69th Annual Meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators will take place July 23-26, 2014 in Rochester, MN. Mike and Satyen are already looking forward to attending.