Dawn Gavin
Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa
Dawn Gavin is a native of Scotland and an artist who has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Her work investigates issues of identity and displacement, employing a range of media from collage and installed drawings to digital video. She is an associate professor in the department of art at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Once an illegal immigrant from Mexico, Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, or "Dr. Q," received his medical degree from Harvard, where he graduated with honors. He is associate professor of neurosurgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins Bayview campus, where he also directs the brain tumor program.
photo by La Kaye Mbah
I understand cartography through drawing-as the transitional record of a series of spatial connections and interdependencies; an attempt to hold in equilibrium the tenuous space between things. The cartographer and the draftsman can choose to reveal or conceal specific pathways of movement and direction. Points of arrival and departure become interchangeable nodes within a complex field of migratory relations through which individuals and commodities can pass. At once frozen, the map presents an accumulated and inert systematic representation of mobility, set against spatial and temporal dynamics that can be understood at every scale, from the neural to the global. The images I produced for this project were made in response to Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa's laboratory research on stem cell migration.
-Dawn Gavin
The brain is the unexplored frontier. We have spent so much effort going to the moon, exploring the universe, when in fact the most wonderful universe is on top of us! Thanks to the way our brain has been wired through evolution, we have the privilege of interacting. Our aim continues to be understanding the surfaces as well as the undersurface of the brain-what makes us move, think, love one another.
Although it is exciting and fascinating what we do as brain surgeons, I have for a long time been envisioning the possibilities of there being more optimal ways to treat brain tumors through our understanding of basic questions about the human brain, the precise location of stem cells, and not only where stem cells are found but how we take advantage of them so we will have better outcomes in patients with brain cancer and other neurological disorders.
-Dr. Q