Science Illustration

Putting the chemistry on the cover.

Beyond the classroom apps, I render the molecular scenes behind the research — cover art and illustration that turn a paper's abstract into something you can actually see. A few pieces made for journals in the computational and materials chemistry world.

Cover art: a ball-and-stick molecule wreathed in the glowing handwritten time-dependent Schrödinger equation on a deep-red field, under the Chemical Reviews masthead.
Alternate issue cover · Chemical Reviews · 2020
Real-time TDDFT

Real-Time Time-Dependent Electronic Structure Theory

X. Li, N. Govind, C. Isborn, A. E. DePrince, K. Lopata
Cover illustration — J. W. May

Chemical Reviews 2020, 120, 9951–9993

Real-time electronic structure theory propagates the electronic wavefunction directly in time, letting you watch electron dynamics and ultrafast spectroscopy unfold on attosecond-to-femtosecond timescales. This review was led by my PhD advisor, Xiaosong Li; the luminous script wrapping the molecule is the time-dependent Schrödinger equation those methods integrate.

Real-time dynamics is the method my own dissertation ran, so putting it on a cover was a full-circle moment. The piece was chosen as a runner-up cover for the issue and rides along in its cover gallery.

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Cover art: a copper atom (orange) doped into an indium phosphide lattice of tan and violet spheres, with blue electrons streaking toward a probe tip under the ACS Materials Letters masthead.
Proposed cover art · ACS Materials Letters · 2020
Cu-doped InP nanocrystals

Synthesis and Spectroscopy of Emissive, Surface-Modified, Copper-Doped Indium Phosphide Nanocrystals

M. E. Mundy, F. W. Eagle, K. E. Hughes, D. R. Gamelin, B. M. Cossairt
Cover illustration — J. W. May

ACS Materials Letters 2020, 2, 576–581

Copper-doped indium phosphide (InP) nanocrystals — a heavy-metal-free alternative to cadmium quantum dots. A single copper dopant, the glowing orange atom, substitutes for an indium in the In–P lattice; its d-level traps a photoexcited charge that recombines as bright, tunable emission, while tailoring the nanocrystal's surface suppresses the competing trap states.

My rendering zooms into that dopant site: the copper center ringed in charge, electrons streaking off toward a scanning probe, indium and phosphorus packed into the surrounding lattice — the invisible chemistry, made into a cover.

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