David Bolinsky

Artist, Brainstormer, Change Agent, Connector, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Life mentor, Producer, World traveler, Writer/Editor

Currently Founder and Creative Director of the medical and scientific animation studio Emersionist, LLC, I earned my AMI-accredited BS in Medical Illustration from Ohio State University in 1974. My first job out of school was a dual faculty appointment as a medical illustrator in Michigan State University's Veterinary and Human Medical Schools, where I Illustrated six books and experimented in early medical education videos. Between my second and third years in medical school at the MSU College of Human Medicine, I was invited to become the senior Medical Illustrator at the Yale School of Medicine, in 1981. I've been an active Member in the Association of Medical Illustrators since 1983. I founded Advanced Imaging, the award-winning pioneer digital medical animation company 1984. I co-founded XVIVO Scientific Animation, an award-winning, full-service Medical and Scientific Digital Animation company, in 2001 and sold my interest in 2012 to pursue more educational and fewer Pharma projects. My teams' work has attracted international attention. A few of my clients have included Merck, Genentech, Novartis, Pfizer, HBO, NBC, NOVA, PBS, Disney Imagineering, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, The Arizona Heart Institute, The Smithsonian Museum, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, DARPA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I give lectures and contribute to panel discussions internationally. I am an associate at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, on the faculty of Singularity University in Mountain View, CA and have an appointment at the Center for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. Interesting talks include TEDx Fuzhou, China 2017; TEDx talks at UCSF, Yale, Woods Hole, MA. I've given many European talks at Zurich Minds and in Madrid, Stockholm, Oslo, Cambridge University, UK and others. While giving the 2009 'Frank Armitage Lecture' at University of Illinois Chicago Medical Center, I got to meet my childhood art hero: Frank Armitage (co-founder of Disney Imagineering); I've presented a number of animation lectures at the World Science Festival, NY; Humanity+ at Harvard; Singularity University; Exponential Medicine Seminar-Lectures; 2010 Address to Medical Illustration Students at the Medical College of Georgia; The 2010 Dean Felt Lecture at Vanderbilt Medical School. Also have made presentations at TEDMED2; TED2007/TED-U 2008/TED India 2009/TED-U 2010; 56th American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Conference; Guild of Natural Science Illustrators Conference; Keynote Speaker at the State of California's Education Conference- Transforming Schools and Communities in the Creative Age, and Keynote Speaker at the 2007 Association of Medical Illustrators Convention. I presented and was a panelist in 2007 at Chicago's Field Museum at the kickoff conference for E.O Wilson's (Harvard) TED Prize project- The Encyclopedia of Life. I have given an annual workshop and panel discussion for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, at Wesleyan University; and an annual lecture on Visual Media in Law at the Quinnipiac University Law School. I have an advisory affiliation with Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry where science and health exhibits have been completely redesigned, and for whom my team helped create a new large heart exhibit. Interviewed with Wired Magazine, Reuters News Service, The International of London, the San Francisco Chronicle, NBC News and the Hartford Current were recognition stemming from my team's creation of Harvard's Molecular and Cellular Biology animation, 'The Inner Life of the Cell', which was profiled by Robert Krulwich on the ABC Evening News. My new company Emersionist, dedicated to creating high quality interactive science tools for students, publishers and medical schools, and I am always available to mentor talented, motivated young people.

I am passionate about my wife and life partner Patty; our sons Jeremiah and Alexander and our wonderfully unexpected daughter Shuangyi. Am working to develop e-books to visualize complex time-and-motion-dependent concepts in science and medicine, for students. I am passionate about bringing my old Harvard project 'The Inner Life of the Cell' to a couple of hundred million middle and high school students.

Insisting on pushing facts alone, without including poetry with one's vision, does mankind a disservice. The exponential expansion of scientific knowledge creates bottlenecks in the transmission important and transformational ideas. Widely dispersing these ideas to where they will reach the broadest audience and do the most good is a challenge in any written language. New vocabularies generated with these discoveries often lack a common basis for definitions much less a visual reference. Visual vocabularies must be created to generate common access to knowledge territories being opened up. I am committed to create new immersive and interactive visual vocabularies in my medical and science visualizations, to be able to counter William Gibson's observation that "the future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed." Most of the future has yet to be imagined, much less distributed. Helping the future's inventors imagine it and giving people a peek is a super rush.

Fabulous dad, I am a visualizer of complex time and motion-dependent science and medical topics., listener, Medical Animation, Medical Illustration, Pen and Ink Illustrator, Visualization of Complex Information

After I spoke in 2007, I was blown away by the quality of enduring friendships I made at TED. Several projects that are exciting and close to my heart were started from TED-break introductions and conversations. My bio-intellectual clock always gets a boost and a reset from TED. As amazing as the talks are great folks I meet who are real and engaging as well as really cool. My first TED talk garnered me invitations to speak all over the world where I met future friends and collaborators. One invitation, to the AYACC Animation Festival in Guiyang, China in 2008 was the genesis of a long conversation I began on a bus with a brilliant, courageous young Chinese teenager. That conversation continues every day, with that same young lady, Shuangyi, now my daughter. Ask if you are interested in more of the story...

I make amazing chili. I spent a decade drawing detailed surgical illustrations with a steel quill pen dipped in ink. I adore mentoring young people and helping them discover how amazing they are. Best is staying friends and seeing their lives unfold.