Each year, the talented researchers at Nottingham Trent University are asked to capture their work in a single striking image for the Images of Research competition. Here's a look at the top finalists and how you can vote for whose work you think should win...
With 86% of NTU’s research rated as world-leading or internationally excellent, the Images of Research competition is a chance to see big ideas distilled into something visual, creative and often unexpected.
From baboons in South Africa and lemurs under observation, to 3D MRI reconstructions and a closer look inside a researcher’s mind, this year’s shortlist brings together science, storytelling and a bit of artistic imagination.
With the University having rounded up the finalists, they want to know what you think – which image should take the top spot?
Take a look at the images below and click here to cast your vote.
1. Dan Turner: Blender on the Brain
"This image presents several volumetric 3D reconstructions of MRI scans, generated from layered 2D data captured during a patient’s treatment of a tumour. While rooted in medical imagery, this image is not intended for diagnosis or analysis. Instead, it reflects my research into how emerging and accessible technologies can be utilised to support students in developing new creative workflows.
My role as an Immersive Media technician in the School of Art and Design focuses on exploring how digital tools (such as the open-source software Blender, for example) can be used beyond their conventional use-cases, enabling students to reinterpret existing resources through experimentation and play. In this instance, by transforming data used primarily for medical application, into an intriguing and surreal visual piece of artwork.
This image is both a by-product and outcome of that exploration and highlights the potential for students to engage with unfamiliar data, not as specialists, but as creatives discovering new ways to make work."
2. Chris Young: Raising Resilience: Motherhood and Survival
A mother baboon scans the valley below, alert to dangers that could threaten her infant’s survival. For baboon mothers, the primary task is simple in theory yet daunting in practice: to nurture their young and give them the best possible chance to reach adulthood and reproduce.
In the harsh environments baboons inhabit, this goal is constantly challenged by aggression from other troop members, predation by leopards, the risk of infanticide following the arrival of new males, and environmental pressures such as drought and declining food quality.
I conduct long term field research with NTU colleagues at Swebeswebe Wildlife Estate in Limpopo, South Africa. We examine individual health and resilience in wild chacma baboons and how social bonds form across the lifespan, and how these relationships may buffer individuals against adversity.
Much like human friendships, strong social connections may prove critical in helping individuals cope with life’s challenges and ultimately thrive.
3. Francesca Tomlinson: Skeletal Muscle Cells
Imagine your muscles have started to waste away and you begin to lose your strength and potentially become immobile. This affects 5.8% of the UK population, due to a disease called sarcopenia.
This image captures our laboratories focus on the creation and development of a physiologically relevant animal-free 3D muscle model to be used for drug discovery of sarcopenia. The blue areas indicate the nucleus of the cell, and the red and green areas indicate the cytoskeleton/sarcomeres. Muscle cells are some of the only types of cells to elongate and have multiple nucleuses within the cell, therefore it is important our muscle model replicates this.
In addition, our 3D muscle model only uses animal-free derived products which is important as a lot of scientific research uses animal products.
This image reveals the future of innovation of science to move away from the use of animals in research and to find drug discoveries for sarcopenia. This is a Z-stack image that was taken at the University’s Medical Technologies Innovation Facility using the Leica Confocal Microscope at 40x magnification.
4. Rupal Bansal: Night, Darkness and the Partition
The borders drawn to divide India and Pakistan upon independence from the British Empire in 1947 plunged the new nations and their people into a darkness of uncertainty, religious polarization, violence, and homelessness. Beyond this metaphorical darkness, this illustration also captures how night time shaped the experiences of violence, migration, and rehabilitation for many refugees crossing the borders in search of safer lands.
My thesis reads fictional texts on Partition as witness accounts to analyse these nocturnal experiences. Much of the violence, particularly arson, was concentrated at night, affecting the witnessing of such acts in the darkness. At the same time, many refugees used the cover of night to avoid detection and cross the borders safely. Moreover, those who arrived in refugee camps often faced inadequate rehabilitation, which led to sleeplessness and chronic insomnia.
Nighttime affects both safety and health during precarious times. My illustration represents these diverse nocturnal experiences, drawing on and reworking visual material from photographs of Partition.
5. Thomas Welsh: Who is Watching Whom?
A ring-tailed lemur peers into a camera, blurring the boundary between observer and observed. Captured within a walkthrough habitat, this moment reflects a space where humans and animals interact directly and share the same environment.
This research explores how these encounters influence both visitor wellbeing and animal welfare. While visitors often report positive emotional responses, including increased happiness and connection to nature, it is equally important to understand how animals experience our presence.
The lemur’s engagement with the camera symbolises this two-way relationship; animals are not simply observed, but active participants in these interactions.
By combining behavioural observations with physiological measures, this work investigates the impacts of close-contact experiences on both parties. Understanding these shared experiences is essential for informing ethical, welfare-focused zoo practices and ensuring that meaningful human–animal connections do not come at a cost to animal wellbeing.
6. Madeleine Burt: Inside the Researcher's Mind
I wanted to create an image that shows the experience of what my research feels like in my head. For my PhD in illustration, I keep lots of notebooks, sketchbooks and mindmaps where I think through new ideas, plan new work and reflect on the overall process of making art.
In this image, I show how the project feels within my mind as I try and problem solve, consider new pathways and find connections between things. It has been created by layering scanned notes, maps, diagrams and pages from my research books, alongside photos of art pieces I have made that eventually will become part of a graphic novel I am working on.
When I give talks about my work, the presentations can make everything seem tidy, ordered and ‘clean’, but this image presents a more authentic account of the process in action. It shows how all the separate parts of the project float around my head at the same time becoming a layered and interwoven mass. Collectively this creates a messy, but richly compelling interior landscape.
7. Bineta Gueye Thiam: Xamalmaam: The Knowing That Remains
In Rufisque, Senegal, a French flag flies at full mast, not over a government building, but over a sacred site.
This is the Place of Maam Coumba Lamb, spiritual home of the Lebu people, where elders and women once gathered to perform a ritual that, according to community memory, foretold the death of the colonial mayor Gabart. Official records say he died of jaundice. The Lebu remember a shipwreck.
Just out of frame, the ruins of the old French colonial port slowly return to the earth. This photograph sits at the heart of a PhD exploring how African communities carry, protect, and transmit psychological knowledge across generations, not through books or archives, but through ritual, memory, and practice. I call this Xamalmaam (xamal, know; maam, ancestor): the knowing that remains.
The research asks a quiet but radical question: what if some knowledge was never lost to colonialism, because it was never stored where colonialism could reach it?
The flag remains, but so does the ritual. The empire left. The Lebu remain. And they practice. This is where liberation begins: not with protest, but with memory. Not with undoing, but with (re)membering what never left.
8. Max Kandhola: The Garden (ਬਾਗ, Bag)
The Garden (ਬਾਗ, Bag) continues my photographic practice in exploring Race, Representation, and Identity (RRID).
The garden unfolds as a therapeutic space where memory is shaped by touch, repetition, and care. Through the rhythmic acts of digging, planting, and tending, my late father cultivated not only the land but a process of emotional repair. The feel of soil, the scent of growth, and the slow transformation of seasons offer calm and continuity.
Gardening becomes a restorative ritual, reconnecting diasporic communities to inherited knowledge and distant memory. In nurturing plants, my father reclaims agency turning displacement into renewal, the garden holding this quiet labour of healing, where memory, identity, and resilience take root.
An SX-70 vintage Polaroid camera, adapted with convex and concave optics, forms a miniature telescope within a mobile garden studio, a performative instrument in which each still-life becomes a choreographed representation. The device echoes Calvino's Mr. Palomar: a lens that, in seeking to understand the world turns upon the diasporic self, negotiating belonging, identity, and place.
Research through practice is inseparable from making. The garden becomes a laboratory, stage, and sanctuary, a site where poetic observation, alchemy, and creative therapeutic practice converge.
Head over to ntu.ac.uk/research/research-image-poll to cast your vote!
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