Louis Schmidt Award

The Louis Schmidt Committee of the BioCommunications Association is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Ted Kinsman is the 2019 Louis Schmidt Laureate. Ted Kinsman has a BS in Physics and a MS in Science Education. He worked as an optical engineer, a physicist, and a high school physics instructor before joining the teaching faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology. Ted was hired at RIT in 2013 in the Photographic Sciences department and teaches classes in high speed photography, photo instrumentation, and scanning electron microscopy as well as other technology and imaging related subjects. As a scientist, Kinsman’s work focuses on using images to teach science related subjects and how to solve problems.

Kinsman’s photographic work explores the boundaries of what is possible using technology to make photographs. His work has been featured in countless books, magazines and in many online publications. His work has appeared on The Discovery Channel, Crime Scene Investigations (CSI), The X-Files, South Park, The Tyra Banks Show, ABC, NBC, PBS, CBS and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Recently, he contributed work to The Frozen Planet series and James Cameron’s Avatar movie. He is also a frequent author of “how to” articles and contributed a chapter for Laboratory Imaging and Photography: Best Practices for Photomicrography and More Focal Press, 2016.

The recipient of numerous awards, Kinsman won the 2015 National Science Foundation’s Imaging Science Contest with an x-ray image of a turtle with eggs. Kinsman’s recent book Cannabis: Marijuana Under the Microscope / Schiffer Publishing 2018, shares his fresh and visually stunning photographs exploring the extraordinary beauty and diversity of the world’s most controversial plant: Cannabis salvia. Cutting-edge scanning electron microscope images, combined with light micrographs and X-rays, are shared in this beautiful book exploring this plant and the intrigue surrounding it.

Applying physics to photography remains one of his specialties. Initially he started his imaging company to publish science books. Within a few years though, the focus changed to the production of high quality time-lapse films of flowers blooming. This footage was widely distributed and has appeared in thousands of commercials. In 1999 his work moved into the area of educational science photography. In this new initiative, scanning electron microscopy and radiography became the focus of his photography. More than 38 stock companies represent Ted’s work both nationally and internationally. Numerous books and magazines including Scientific American, Science News, New York Times, and National Geographic routinely use his images.