NOTE: This is one in a series of articles on Brock’s 2023-24 Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship recipients. Read other stories in the series on The Brock News.

Growing up as a first-generation Filipino immigrant in a small town, it was sometimes difficult for Marcus Villena (BSc ’23) to navigate social and cultural barriers.

While at times it was challenging to learn and connect, those experiences fueled his intellectual inquisitiveness and  sparked his passion for helping others better understand new knowledge.

The Brock University graduate student has paved a path for himself that not only combines his interests in sciences, data analysis and art, but also helps to communicate important research and information in an effective and accessible way.

As one of 20 recipients of Brock University’s 2023-24 Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship, Villena hopes to further develop his interests and skills in scientific illustration and data visualization while also enhancing his academic knowledge in Biological Sciences and continuing to contribute to his community.

In Villena’s family, it was understood that knowledge builds character and it is best to use it in the service of others. In elementary and secondary school, Villena developed an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and used his strengths to benefit his community. He volunteered at STEM-related fairs hoping to inspire others, especially those from diverse cultural backgrounds.

When he came to Brock as a Biomedical Sciences undergraduate student, he got involved with Med Plus and volunteered his time with Niagara Health’s emergency department. During the pandemic, he co-founded a non-profit organization called Helping Hands for the Homeless to assist people in need. He also took on leadership roles as President of the Faculty of Mathematics and Science Student Council and Vice-President and writer of Brock Health Magazine.

He assisted fellow students with their science coursework as a tutor with Brock Learning Services and co-founded the Brock Learners’ Association to further support his peers in their educational journey.

“Students were having difficulty communicating and understanding scientific concepts, and visualizing these ideas really comes through my tutoring style,” says Villena. “I like to draw a lot, put things on a chalkboard to figure out what concepts could look like.”

In his third year, when he and many of his peers learned online instead of in the classroom, he spent some of his spare time exploring digital painting and drawing, and dreamt up ways he could combine his science education with his longtime interest in art.

“Instead of just drawing random doodles, I wanted to figure out how I could use my art to help with research,” he says.

Villena reached out to a few professors he knew to pitch them on his newly developed talents. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Ian Patterson took him up on his offer and asked him to visualize data for a grant proposal and figures for a manuscript he was working on. It required Villena to first analyze the data so he could better understand it and effectively visualize it for others.

“A bar chart or scatterplot may not entirely capture the narrative of certain sciences,” says Villena. “I was focused on figuring out a way to also communicate the statistical data visually to people who have little or no prior knowledge of his work.”

Marcus Villena (BSc ’23) presented his research last month at the 2024 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Conference hosted by the International Society for Computational Biology.

Villena also worked closely with laboratory supervisors Martin Dragan and Parker Holman in Brock’s Anatomy Lab to create educational resources that could better engage students and designed a three-panel comic to communicate to people in Namibia the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine as part of his work in the HLSC 3P33 Experiential Learning in Health Sciences course.

“Whether the design is more on the data visualization side that involves computational analysis or focuses more on scientific illustration for knowledge translation, it’s about visualizing information in a way that’s friendly, accessible and more appealing to public audiences,” he says.

Villena’s involvement with Patterson’s team led to a co-authorship on the publication, starting him down a path in graduate studies that would combine his interests in science, technology and art.

With a strong foundation in research and scientific inquiry, he enrolled in the Master of Science in Biological Sciences program under the supervision of Yifeng Li, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning for Biomedical Data Science, to delve deeper into advanced computing skills, such as biomedical image processing, algorithms and machine learning.

Villena is thankful for his faculty mentors and is grateful to have received the Horizon Graduate Scholarship. With its support, he plans to continue using his intellectual curiosity to fuel cross-disciplinary innovation and collaboration within the Brock community.

“Overcoming my challenges has led to both building myself as an individual, alongside showing me the importance of diversity and representation within academia,” he says. “Through the Horizon Graduate Scholarship, I hope to continue mentoring others and work towards making education more accessible and inclusive.”