While popular culture likes to brand science as logical, objective, and serious and art as more emotional and subjective, the two fields are “oddly parallel,” says Doug Baulos, M.F.A., assistant professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Art and Art History. “At its foundation, art is about perception and experience, and that’s basically what science is as well.”

This spring, Baulos helped students bridge the divide in a course focusing on scientific illustration—a broad field encompassing everything from diagrams and infographics to medical illustrations for academic texts to digital 3-D model-making. Science needs art to help communicate concepts that can’t be explained easily or succinctly in words, Baulos says. In his own early days as an illustrator, Baulos worked for a plastic surgeon and gave patients a preview of their new look after a procedure. “They need an artist for that,” he says. “Art graduates have a ton of opportunities for careers in science.”

In turn, science gives art the tools for creativity—it takes chemists to create paints and other art supplies, after all. But just as important, science “supports art by giving it a basis and structure,” says Anna Zoladz, a senior art major who took Baulos’s class. “Research strengthens our artwork and gives it meaning; we know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”