Nicholas Judson - About the artist

About the artist

I originally became interested in pencil drawing when first introduced to it by John Nankivell, a friend of the family. While doing some drawing from the time I was 8 or so, it has only now come to the forefront of my interests. I enjoy the technical and scientific aspects of the way things are put together, which I suppose is partly expressed by the detail at which I choose to draw. I also enjoy the challenges that exist in working with pencil to show different textures and brightnesses of the object represented.

This page also enables people to find out more about me and to reconnect with me from past lives. To that end, it also includes enough information for search engines to parse useful (?) things about me.

There are only so many things that one can do with life, but along the way so far I have been lucky enough to meet lots of great people as an undergrad at Columbia College at Columbia University, where, among other things I majored in Biochemistry and rowed crew on the Columbia Lightweight crew team. I then went on to meet more great people at graduate school in microbiology at Harvard and worked in John Mekalanos's lab researching essential genes in the organism Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of the diarrheal disease cholera. Almost the entire time that I was there, and for several years afterwards, I had the great fortune of taking pottery classes with the wonderful, kind, amusing teacher and artist Makoto Yabe at the Harvard-Radcliffe Ceramics studio. I was very sad when he died in May of 2005. I didn't throw any pots for many years, but have recently started again, which is very satisfying. After time doing research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the J. Craig Venter Institute (more great people in both places), I left the full time pursuit of bench science for a while to pursue the drawing of beautiful and well-proportioned things. I am now back at MIT, where I help lead a group working on energy resilience engineering questions.

My family has always been incredibly supportive. Feel free to support them, too! You can buy my father's books here, my sister's here, and read her column in the New York Times here.

There were some touching obituaries for my father in the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, and MIT Technology Review.