The Academy of Natural Sciences, in collaboration with the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, established the Museum Innovation Fund (MIF) to support projects that are developed by Drexel University faculty and students and promote innovative approaches to museum learning and engagement.

We are pleased to announce the Winter 2025/Spring 2026 awardees.

A Culinary Archive of the Americas

Led by Steve Vásquez Dolph, Associate Teaching Professor, Global Studies and Modern Languages; supported by Rachel Sherman, Associate Director, Drexel Food Lab

This project is a 10-week bilingual (Spanish and English) learning program that brings together Drexel students and Philadelphia community members to engage with ancestral culinary practices from Mexico and Central America. Through alternating experiential learning sessions and hands-on workshops, participants will explore the technical, material and narrative dimensions of food cultures across the diaspora. Experiential sessions will be co-taught by Rachel Sherman (Drexel Food Lab) and Steve Vásquez Dolph (College of Arts and Sciences), while workshops will be led by community culinary experts and coordinated by Mexican artist Ivonne Pinto Garcia.

The program frames cooking as a multisensory pathway to understanding ecology, migration, cultural memory and science in everyday life. By centering ancestral technologies such as nixtamalización, comales de barro and seed-keeping, it foregrounds practices often marginalized in academic settings yet essential to community sustainability and intergenerational continuity. Hands-on learning positions community members as knowledge holders whose expertise is central to the learning environment.

A key outcome of the course will be an illustrated bilingual glossary that documents 12 core terms and practices. Developed collaboratively by students, community members and an artist-illustrator, the glossary will preserve knowledge typically transmitted orally or through practice. It will serve as a resource for ongoing education at the Academy and for families seeking to sustain and reclaim culinary heritage across generations.

This project is connected to the Academy’s exhibition Botany of Nations, open March 28, 2026 – February 14, 2027 in the Dietrich Gallery. Botany of Nations provides a new perspective on the legendary Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery. Co-curated with Enrique Salmón, PhD, an ethnobotanist and author of Iwígara: The Kinship of Plants and People, and developed with contributions from Indigenous cultural historians, Botany of Nations offers a culturally layered view of the plants of North America.

From Dioramas to Living Worlds: Virtual Extensions for Immersive Museum Experiences

Led by Emil Polyak, Associate Professor, Program Director of the Master of Science in Digital Media program

This project explores a two-part approach to museum visualization that combines advanced 3D capture with methods such as generative AI to enhance visitor engagement. First, the project will employ state-of-the-art surveying techniques and 3D Gaussian Splatting, validated through recent publications at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 and SIGraDi 2025, to digitally capture the Academy’s Dinosaur Hall with high accuracy. These reconstructions will support interactive and immersive experiences—including virtual reality—that balance scientific fidelity with intuitive public access.

The second component moves from documentation to reimagination by developing an experimental pipeline that uses advanced methods, including generative AI, to animate static dioramas into immersive, panoramic environments. The realism of the taxidermy specimens provides a uniquely credible dataset, grounding AI-assisted animation in authentic biological form and ecological context. The aim is to transform frozen scenes into 360-degree experiences in which animals appear to move as if observed in life.

Student participation will be integrated through the new graduate-level course Visual Storytelling in Digital Media, launching in the Winter term. The course frames the Academy’s collections as platforms for technical and narrative experimentation, embedding experiential, research-informed learning directly into the project.

This project is connected to the Academy of Natural Sciences’ collection of dioramas on permanent display in North America, Africa and Asia halls. The diorama, a distinctive fusion of art and science, has provided a window into the wilderness for generations of museum visitors.