Drew Berry

Drew Berry is a very cool guy. He works as a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) and has been there for over a decade. Born in New York, he moved to Australia to attend the University of Melbourne where he received a Bachelor of Science degree and then a Master of Science degree for his work using time-lapse microscopy to study human cells. He started animating in 1995 when a friend gave him a copy of Infini-D. Over the next few years, he continued to animate on the side, and work as “the Photoshop guy” at WEHI during the day. He then started some work on some animations explaining the life cycle of the malaria parasite using new data that some of his fellow scientist at WEHI had discovered and an education copy of 3ds Max. These animations proved to be quite popular and jumpstarted him into a full Career in Medical animation. Since then, he has switched to using Maya (which I think is cool because that's the program I use in all my animation classes) and his work has been featured in documentaries, TV shows, museums and art galleries in Australian, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, France, and the US. This year, Drew Berry was awarded with a MacArthur fellowship. (If you don’t know what that is, look here)

However, besides being awesome and relatively renowned, he is also pretty approachable. Let me explain. After learning about Mr. Berry and doing some research on his work, I decided to e-mail him and see if he had any helpful hints for someone doing research on biomedical animation and interested in possibly pursuing it as a career. I sent an email on a Friday morning and by that night I had already received a reply. He had a few good tips that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own and also referred me to a few different website that were pretty cool. I was planning on actually writing what he said and which websites he recommended, but I just went back into my e-mails and re-read it and found a little note in the “letterhead” at the bottom stating that the information in the e-mail is confidential and asking that I not print, share, forward, disclose, or use it without asking permission first. So, sorry, but I’m just going to tell you that it was pretty helpful, cool stuff and if you want to know for yourself, you could e-mail him yourself and I’m sure he’d be happy to answer you.

A few more interesting things before finishing up this post:

I realized that I watched Mr. Berry’s Malaria parasite video my freshman year when doing some research for a Health Promotion class I was in. Also, while looking through some other things that Mr. Berry has animated, I found one that my molecular biology professor had shown us part of one of his pieces depicting DNA replication. So, even though I hadn’t even heard of Drew Berry before starting this blog, I was already familiar with some of his work.