By day, he works as an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School and the director of cancer bioinformatics at Brown’s Legorreta Cancer Center.
But once the sun sets, he works as a cartoonist, drawing and publishing scientific cartoons on his website Biocomicals. Uzun takes the experiences he gains from time in the laboratory and classroom to create research-inspired projects, ranging from cartoons for his website to a children’s book he and his wife created for their son, titled “Puppy And Aslan: Where is my lunch box?”
Uzun discovered his love for drawing at a very young age.
“When I was a kid, I would go with my parents to their friends’ house, and instead of bringing toys, I was bringing a bunch of papers because I was going to be drawing cartoons,” he said.
“My mom is an artist, so maybe those genes were passed on to myself,” Uzun joked.
At first, Uzun drew cartoons to reflect events in his daily life. But by the time he was attending graduate school at Northeastern University, his “daily life was always about science.” In 2006, he created biocomicals.com, where he frequently posts science-themed comics.
Uzun’s daily life — conversing with students, giving lectures and conducting experiments in the lab — inspires the cartoons he publishes. His research centers on network biology, which is the study of interactions between proteins, genes and disease.
To capture any funny ideas that come to him during the day, Uzun carries a digital notebook wherever he goes.
One day, he was working in the lab and thought, “What if I made these pipettes talk?”
Sometimes, Uzun’s ideas come in the form of a pun. For example, when running gel electrophoresis, he says “the gel is really running.” Courtesy of Alper Uzun
The pipette is just one of the many laboratory tools that Uzun has brought to life.
After devising an idea, Uzun sketches it out up to 10 times, he said. Sketching, coloring, shading and writing his cartoons often keeps him up past 11 p.m.
Although his two jobs are time intensive, Uzun finds it easy to balance them. To him, drawing has never been a burden.
“When you love your work, then the time doesn’t matter,” he said. “I really love this. That’s why I keep doing it.”
The products of Uzun’s hard work and passion are what Francois Luks, professor of surgery, pediatrics and OB-GYN at Warren Alpert Medical School, describes as “scientific illustration” — a “growing, fairly new form of art” centered around “communicating moods, frustrations, joys (and) fears.”
“Medical cartoons (are) a great new form to connect people and also talk about diversity and access to care because it’s a very democratic medium,” Luks said. “It makes you more humanistic.”
Uzun said that a big part of being a science researcher is working past grant rejections. In making cartoons about this experience, “you see that you are not the only one, everybody is suffering in that way,” he said. Courtesy of Alper Uzun
For Uzun, cartoons allow him to convey “the things that are not easily said, or tough to say, in a more explicit way.” In his illustrations, Uzun aims to reflect a wide variety of perspectives, from that of a student to that of a professor.
“You can tell everything in cartoons,” Uzun added.
Jennifer Li ’25, a student in Uzun’s Genomics and Machine Intelligence Lab, said it “takes a great deal of thought, patience and empathy” to communicate daily experiences in science through cartoons.
Though his comics are “thought-provoking,” Li said they also “make research feel quite approachable and relatable, even for those who aren’t in the field.”
Ben Ahn MD’26, who has worked with Uzun since his first year of medical school, also believes Uzun’s cartoons help make research “palatable and approachable for non-science people,” and more “fun” for scientists, too.
Uzun’s cartoons have appeared in papers and on the cover of Trends in Genetics, a scientific journal.
When Uzun got the call asking to use his cartoon about junk DNA on the cover of the scientific journal Trends in Genetics, he said, “I was so happy about myself.” Courtesy of Alper Uzun
When Ece Uzun, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Warren Alpert, first saw her husband-to-be’s comics, she noticed they “were very detailed and some of them show really fine-tuned details about science.”
The two first met in 2009 while attending the same graduate school. They now have an 11-year-old son. When asked what she thinks of her husband’s cartoons, Ece Uzun said “they’re great.”
“But I’m biased because I’m married to him,” Ece Uzun joked.
When the same question was asked to the artist himself, Alper Uzun responded with a smile: “They’re like my children.”
