Engineering photo wins prize at SNSF Scientific Image Competition
"Vanishing self-portrait" by UNFoLD PhD student Gaétan Raynaud © CC-BY-NC-ND Gaétan Raynaud
School of Engineering PhD student Gaétan Raynaud has won first prize in the "Places and Tools of Research" category of the 2025 Swiss National Science Foundation Scientific Image Competition. His winning photograph captured an experiment in a wind tunnel.
According to a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) press release on April 22nd, Raynaud's image was among 20 winners selected by the jury out of 430 works submitted - a record number of winners since the competition's launch in 2017. The winning works and a selection of the submissions will be exhibited at the Journées Photographiques de Bienne from 3 to 25 May 2025. Raynaud recently discussed his work on Swiss Public Radio RTS's CQFD program.
Tanja Gesell, president of the jury, said of the images: "They give you unusual insights and tell many little stories from the everyday life of scientists, ranging from teamwork to solo explorations, from mathematical abstraction to powerful photographs at any scale. It is this unmediated in-between space between the submitted images and the underlying science that makes this SNSF event special."
A human element
Gaétan Raynaud is a PhD student in the School of Engineering's Unsteady flow diagnostics laboratory (UNFoLD), led by Karen Mulleners. The lab specializes in studying unsteady vortex-dominated flow phenomena, with applications in bio-inspired propulsion and wind turbine rotor blade aerodynamics. Entitled "Vanishing self-portrait", Raynaud's winning image captures a wind tunnel experiment.
"Behind heavy curtains to block out light, my work is to ensure that everything goes according to plan," he writes in his submission. "A large fan generates continuous gusts, causing our sample – a flag – to flap rapidly and unpredictably. We collect data to better understand phenomena such as the motion of leaves, blade flutter vibrations and the mechanisms of snoring. Between experiments, I switch on the light, cut samples and install a new flag at the outlet of the wind tunnel. The long-exposure photograph has captured this activity, serving as a reminder of the researchers behind each experiment. While the scientific results may be remembered in a few years, the human aspect of this work will fade and vanish like the ghost in this self-portrait."
The competition jury said of Raynaud's photo: "This powerful image of a scientific experiment reveals, upon closer inspection, another story - the presence of the solitary, often invisible researcher, whose only traces are ghostly and fluid, captured through long exposure."
The SNSF maintains an online gallery showcasing the 3,569 works submitted to the competition since 2017, representing a unique archive of contemporary scientific images. They are made freely available to the public, institutions and the media under a Creative Commons licence, enabling non-commercial use.