Dr Daria Chrobok tells science stories with art. Her illustrations are irresistible: colourful, engaging, often quirky and fun. But they’re far more than just pretty pictures. Armed with a lifelong love of nature and biology and underpinned by the deep understanding from her PhD in plant physiology, she’s all about impact.
Chrobok wants to showcase great science, communicate complex ideas and turn statistics and dense research into meaningful images. Through her business DC SciArt, she strives to capture public imagination but also to wow decision-makers and shine a spotlight on the brilliant science she thinks might just change our world.
“Many people don’t know all the effort researchers put into their work. So, I want to make it shine,” she declares. “It’s good to be: Bam! in the face of people to show how awesome it is, to represent all the amazing knowledge, because it’s so important.”
Her work appears broadly, in scientific papers and grant applications but also picture books, flyers and as social media posts. When she delivers a final illustration, she gets to “create happiness” and bask in client satisfaction, but the work’s real impact often comes later, with more prominent publication or a boost in funding for the researchers.
“When a scientist says, ‘We got this 3-million-Euro grant …’, it is so rewarding. I contributed illustrations that helped them to get money so they could continue their work on whatever … drought-resistant crops, perhaps,” she says. “So, I contribute a little bit further down the line on the global scale. It feels important on many levels: person to person, person to organisation, but also globally, depending on what I illustrate.”
Down to earth meets digital
Chrobok was born in Poland but spent most of her childhood in Germany. It was a nature-loving family – think mushroom picking, walking in the mountains, visits to the seaside.
“My grandma in Poland had a little farm, you know, with animals and fruit trees and wheat fields around,” she says. “We never lived in the centre of the city but always in the suburbs, close to water. For me now, when I visit big cities, I’m like, ‘Where are the trees? Where’s the forest? I miss the nature!’”
Chrobok had a tough decision to make in senior school: art or science? She loved both, but never imagined that they could blend into one harmonious profession.
“I’d always like to draw and to paint when I was little. At school, I would paint and do the art homework for my friends because they hated it and I loved it! But I also liked nature and biology,” she recalls.
“Back then, I didn’t know that something like what I do now even existed. Also, I had this thought: ‘Daria, you don’t like computers! Drawing digitally, on a computer, what the heck, that’s not real art! And you can’t make a living from being an artist!’” Chrobok laughs. “I enjoyed biology a lot as well, so I went in that direction.”
Chrobok’s PhD research took her to Sweden – she speaks English, Polish, German, Swedish and enough Spanish to get by – but the deeper she was immersed in the academic world, the less comfortable she felt. Stress, ethical dilemmas, disappointments and frustrations began to take their toll and, although she still loved science, she was falling out of love with academia. At the same time, her colleagues had begun to tell her how much they admired her scientific illustrations.
“That’s when I realised, ‘If I make my figures and graphs extra nice … this is how I’m kind of spreading happiness! This is what I love about science: the knowledge, solving riddles and making the information accessible. People started to realise this and ask me for help.”
Being a helpful colleague is one thing: striking out on a brave new professional path is quite another. Just over two years into her PhD research, Chrobok presented her yearly research summary to colleagues and, in an emotional conclusion, confessed her goal of becoming a science illustrator.
“You have to stand up for yourself – for what you believe and what you feel as well. Science is about logic, objectivity, data, numbers … I personally think science has a lot to do with feelings and creativity. But that’s not really encouraged.
“Saying it out loud made it super real, no coming back. But even then, I knew I would bring a huge value with these illustrations.”
Committed to collaboration and communication
Chrobok collaborates closely with clients – doing her own research when necessary – to devise concepts, designs and colour schemes that will create images with impact. She has a deep knowledge of everything from cellular biology to plant varieties, diseases and lifecycles and her work has told stories about biorefineries, CRISPR-edited rice plants and leaf metabolism.
But even more than that, perhaps, she understands the weight of responsibility on scientists: what’s at stake if they don’t tell their stories well and the powerful difference they can make – to their own future, their research organisation and, potentially, to the planet – if they do.
“If you can’t communicate your science, if you can’t make your grant officers understand why what you do is cool, why this biology is important, it’s a problem. Let’s say there’s a physicist making the decision about your plant biology grant application … if you don’t make them understand, they won’t give you the money. That hurts you more than spending a little bit of money on an illustration.”
She sees the shifting possibilities of storytelling in science. Scientific journals – where a significant amount of her work appears – often impose tight word limits on research papers. Replacing a slab of dense (albeit important) words or highly detailed graph with an illustration that shares an easy-to-follow story with peers, other scientists and even government and commercialisation partners, is powerful.
“We don’t always remember text, but we remember illustrations, and connect them to the people who do the science. So, you get grants, you get published easier, you might get an extra social media post or a journal that picks up your illustration and spreads your research further.
“You might get collaborators, you might find a great PhD student somewhere that sees your illustration and says, ‘I want to work on that.’ It increases your impact into the world, and you become more visible.”
Chrobok knows, first-hand, the competing demands on scientists. There are high-stakes decisions to make about how to use limited resources. She feels so strongly about the potential for scientific images that she links to other illustrators from her own blog: “We all work together for one goal, the communication of science,” she writes.
She won’t single out particular projects or grant-winning clients as favourites because “how can you choose a favourite when they all mean so much?” But whether she’s telling stories about the impact of drought stress on plants, contributing to the GMO debate or illustrating the magic of photosynthesis for Swedish television, she is certain of her contribution.
“Scientists are not trained to illustrate like this. They are trained to do something else. And then still, there are demands they do 10,000 things on top of it: more outreach, more graphical abstracts … More and more stress is put on them.
“So, I think I provide a safety bubble, they focus on what they want to do, what they love to do and I focus on my specialty of illustrating their science. Working with me basically means buying yourself a bit of freedom and peace of mind.”
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Article by Michelle Fincke
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