Our cover art for this issue of Alumni News & Notes (above, left) was designed by second-year medical student Devina Gonzalez. The painting depicts a surgeon knitting a strand of DNA. Devina notes, “I wanted to convey the idea that just as a knitter (art form) carefully creates a pattern with thread, so too do doctors and scientists delicately manipulate DNA to improve human health—similarly there’s a convergence of art and medicine and techniques of things such as knitting that are advantageous and parallel some techniques in medicine. The painting serves as a reminder of the beauty and complexity of the intersection between medicine and art.
“The painting is a visual representation of the limitless potential of the intersection of art and medicine and how it can be used to improve human lives. It is a reminder of the boundless creativity and skill that is required to achieve these goals.”
Devina describes the intersection of art and medicine in her life through this experience:
“While watching a cataract-removal surgery, I abruptly realized the complexities of a cataract—the extraordinariness of a non-extraordinary condition. There was something otherworldly about the cataract’s irreplicable color schemes of yellow cadmium, phthalo green, midnight black, and titanium white. When magnified, the brown cataracted eye possessed its own solar system—its own celestial sphere of constellations. It was cosmic—it was art. The clouded lens was eventually removed and replaced with an intraocular lens. It was during that procedure I developed a more profound love for medicine, or perhaps it was the overwhelming delirium from witnessing an eye be incised, but I believe it was because my two worlds of art and medicine collided, and it all made sense.”
Devina earned her BA in neuroscience at Smith College, where she worked as a research aide in several neuroendocrinology laboratories and became an intern and scholar for New York University’s Project Healthcare program. After graduation, she worked as a health assistant for the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, and conducted two years of cardiac electrophysiology research at Cedars Sinai in the Smidt Heart Institute. Devina later pursued a master of public health (MPH) at Dartmouth College, where she focused on health inequities impacting Latino communities. Currently, she is a third-year medical student at the Geisel School of Medicine and a national leader for the Latino
Medical Student Association, where she leads the graphic design and web management committees. She is committed to health accessibility and equity, the intersection between art and medicine, and providing culturally competent care in any specialty she enters!
