About

Posted Sat, 2009-06-20 12:06 by David Liao

My time as a young researcher in physics inspires many of my pieces. I create impressions of nature, illustrate scientific concepts, and paint buildings of scholarship. My art reveals learning processes: nature paints perceptions, we frame its art in conceptual boxes, and we gather ourselves in the boxes of the academy.

My published scientific illustrations include a figure in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [a]. I was commissioned for a watercolor Princeton University printed on Christmas cards sent to 2500 graduate alumni. The English Wikipedia’s front page has featured my watercolor of Cleveland Tower as “Picture of the Day" [b].

Born in Red Bank, NJ and raised in California, I paint scenery from both States and from frequent travel. I received a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA and an M.A. in Physics from Princeton University.

Highlighted citations

[a] Illustration of bacterial microhabitat device for scientific journal article

Keymer et al., Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 105(51): 20269-20273 (2008): Fig. 1.

Commissioned watercolor of Wyman House in Princeton, NJ

Princeton University printed this image on Christmas cards sent to 2500 graduate alumni in 2007.

[b] Watercolor of Cleveland Tower, Princeton, NJ.

Featured as Picture of the Day on the English Wikipedia's main page, 2007 July 31.

Education

2007 M.A. Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

2006 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow
2006 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research Fellow
2005--Present PhD program in physics

2005 B.S. Physics, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA

2004 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar

2001 Piedmont Hills High School, San Jose, CA

2001 United States Physics Team, College Park, MD

Media skills

  • Web. HTML, some PHP, some Drupal.
  • Audio/visual. Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop, GIMP, PowerPoint. GoldWave, MP3 recording, some Audacity. Advanced use of point-and-shoot digital cameras.
  • Typesetting. LaTeX, Microsoft Office.
  • Science. MatLab/Octave, Mathematica

Related employment

  • Technical support. Assistance formatting and arranging audio/video for computer-aided slideshows.
  • Harvey Mudd College. Tutored quantum physics and theoretical quantum mechanics