Lee Boot brings methods of thinking and practice rooted in the arts into science-driven research enterprises that inform public efforts to meet societal challenges in areas such as education, public health, and economic development. He is the Director of the Imaging Research Center at UMBC, a public university on the edge of Baltimore. The multidisciplinary research projects he has initiated and led since the late 1990s prototype novel media and visualization technologies, forms, and approaches to advance public interests.
Though he began his professional research career as a media artist, his MFA is in painting, a practice which he uses to constantly inform his research. For him, painting most directly embodies the full scope of artistic thought modes and practices, which he calls, artistic methods. Particularly when addressing challenges that involve human behavior, Lee believes that engaging artistic methods to complement the scientific method changes the research profoundly—increasing imaginative scope and innovation, and grounding the work in the questions of human meaning and culture needed to connect it to the people it serves.
Though he began his professional research career as a media artist, his MFA is in painting, a practice which he uses to constantly inform his research. For him, painting most directly embodies the full scope of artistic thought modes and practices, which he calls, artistic methods. Particularly when addressing challenges that involve human behavior, Lee believes that engaging artistic methods to complement the scientific method changes the research profoundly—increasing imaginative scope and innovation, and grounding the work in the questions of human meaning and culture needed to connect it to the people it serves.
