Ruth West is an interdisciplinary researcher and media artist working with emerging technologies. She envisions a future in which art-science-technology integration allows us to open new portals of imagination, knowledge and communication across cultures and create solutions for our most pressing global problems. Her work spans new media, molecular genetics, information aesthetics, scientific visualization, virtual/immersive environments, augmented reality, psychology, neuroscience, and participatory mobile and social technologies. Along with a keen ability to cultivate and direct large-scale cross-disciplinary collaborations she has extensive and successful expertise producing works that engage broad public audiences in the potentials of new cultural forms resulting from the blending of art, science and emerging technologies. Her work has been presented or featured in SIGGRAPH, WIRED Magazine’s NextFest, UCLA Fowler Museum, CAA, Ingenuity Festival Cleveland, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, FILE 09 Sao Paulo, IEEE VR, Mobisys, SPIE, IEEE ICIP, the American Journal of Human Genetics, Genomics, Leonardo, LEA, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, NPR's The Connection, NY Times, Genome News Network, AMINIMA and Artweek.
Ruth serves as Strategist, Emerging Art-Science Initiatives at the UCSD Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). Prior affiliations include: UCLA CENS (NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing), NCMIR (National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research), UCLA Design | Media Arts, and Cedars-Sinai Health System.