A colorful splash of geometric shapes and line drawings of clinical imagery has taken shape on the once-white walls of the old Medical School lobby at UMass Chan Medical School. Fourth-year medical student Jennifer Sohn led the effort to bring the mural to life, recruiting student volunteers, working with Facilities Management to find the perfect location and securing funding from UMass Chan’s chapter of the Gold Humanism Honor Society, of which she is a member.
“My high school was full of murals, with most of them done by students. I painted a mural of a vintage soda shop in my math teacher’s room and it was a magical experience to leave a mark that way,” said Sohn, who graduated from Chelmsford High School. “When I moved to Worcester and saw all the murals around the city, it was one of my immediate favorite things about living here. It’s a big part of Worcester culture, so I wanted to bring that here.”
First-year medical student Jean Song, who has an undergrad degree in art history and biology from Hamilton College, designed the mural.
“We wanted to represent all three schools and how they overlap and build off of each other,” said Song, who hails from Orange County, California. She proposed the concept of additive light, explaining that when red, green and blue light overlap with each other, you get cyan, magenta, yellow. “When all three of them overlap, you get the pure spectrum, which highlights every single color,” she said.
“When I moved to Worcester and saw all the murals around the city, it was one of my immediate favorite things about living here. It’s a big part of Worcester culture, so I wanted to bring that here.”
Keen observers will spot a skeleton of a human hand and a double helix.
“I liked the idea that we’re all shining a different light upon the same thing: compassionate care, and furthering research to advance scientific education, but we’re all doing it in different ways with different focuses,” Song said.
Like Song, Sohn has a background in science and art. She has a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from Tufts University, where she participated in the Chamber Singers, concert choir and visual arts. Sohn will graduate in June from the T.H. Chan School of Medicine and go on to serve her preliminary residency year at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. She hopes to specialize in physical medicine and rehabilitation (also known as physiatry), which she describes as a synthesis of neurology, orthopedics and anesthesia, often treating people with disabling conditions like chronic pain or neurodegenerative disease.
“Art and music were things I loved and I didn’t realize until high school that science can also tell stories,” said Sohn. “By understanding the rules by which our bodies work and by which chemistry and the world operates, you really start to understand what you see around you. I liked science and I also love stories; medicine is a great marriage of that.”
