Researcher-poets use verse to help to ease isolation and grief, sing the praises of nature or depict the joys of commuting by bicycle.Credit: WeBond Creations/Getty
Last year, in a moving family farewell celebration, palliative-care physician and researcher Danielle Chammas said goodbye to a long-time patient with cancer. When Chammas came home afterwards, she wrote a poem. Her Defiance, which was later published in the journal JAMA Oncology, describes the woman as “the leaf clinging fiercely to the tree” (D. Chammas JAMA Oncol. 12, 215; 2026).
With family at bedside,/ and the beau’s guitar/ filling the room,/ the leaf released the tree,/ and she knew,/ for the briefest of moments,/ what it meant to fly.
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Chammas, who works at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), says her patient “would have walked through fire to stay in her daughter’s life” and didn’t let cancer dictate how she was going to die.
Chammas also co-directs the Poetic Medicine programme at the UCSF MERI Center for Humanity in Healthcare. The centre researches the art of poem-making to help with grief and “aims to cultivate spaces where voices are valued, connections are made, and healing is nurtured”, she explains. At weekly online meetings, clinicians, carers, patients and members of the public are invited to listen to poems and write their own. Participants join from around the world. Chammas often shares the works of poets such as the US writer Maya Angelou and the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Rumi with people in her care.
“The humanities are foundational to my ability to do my clinical work,” Chammas says, because poetry enables her to “truly accompany somebody through something unthinkable”. That process, she says, is as fundamental to her work “as my knowledge of how opiates hit pain-modulating mu receptors”.
Science and poetry might seem like an odd pairing. One deals in facts; the other, seemingly, in feelings. But the two fields don’t negate each other, Chammas says. “We live in a very dualistic and binary culture, good or bad, healthy or sick, living or dying, optimists or pessimists. But I think we do ourselves and our society a real disservice if that’s our only way of seeing the world.” Poetry taps into “the multitudes that are in us” and is “a really beautiful way to open our minds”, she says.
Indeed, physicians and scientists can be poets, too. For instance, the physician William Carlos Williams and the immunologist Miroslav Holub wrote and published highly praised poems. The mathematician Ada Lovelace, widely recognized as an inventor of computer programming, also invented her own genre, called poetical science, which brings together abstract mathematics and the imagination. Of the Analytical Engine, a mechanical computing machine conceived by Charles Babbage in the 1830s, Lovelace wrote that it “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”.
Like Lovelace, poetry-writing researchers and physicians interviewed by Nature’s careers team describe how poetry can meld seamlessly with science. Many draw inspiration from scientific phenomena and nature, such as fish, hurricanes, the climate crisis and even electricity pylons. They aim to translate the wonder and beauty of the world of tiny molecules and the one visible around us into words. By pouring their scientific knowledge into poetic forms, they often find fresh ways of understanding complex problems and developing solutions.
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Colleen Farrelly is a mathematician at Post Urban Ventures, a firm specializing in artificial intelligence and deep tech in Miami, Florida. She echoes Lovelace in seeing mathematical patterns in poetic structures, “especially in avant-garde poetry, where we’re creating collages of images”. Farrelly specializes in topology, a branch of maths that delves into the properties of structures. For instance, a sphere can be pulled into an ellipsoid by stretching it, yet its geometric properties stay the same.
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She uses poetry to organize her thoughts and make sense of her experiences. One example is a poem she composed last September while two swirling storms, hurricanes Humberto and Imelda, orbited around each other about 800 kilometres off the coast of Florida. Published in the poetry magazine Rattle, Weathering the Storm describes the Fujiwhara effect, a phenomenon first described in 1921 by Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwhara in which two storms dance around each other.
In the words of Farrelly’s poem,
The Fujiwhara effect suggests that storm systems in close proximity feed off each other’s energy unpredictably. Two systems might clash or combine or canoodle until bursting apart like twin flames.
“It’s great to communicate things in poetry, because I don’t think a lot of people know about the Fujiwhara effect,” says Farrelly. “I really like being able to explain maths to lay audiences that way.” She adds that opening up this creative side is “so useful in science”.
That resonates with Fionn Rogan, an engineer at the Sustainability Institute at University College Cork in Ireland. He works on ‘transformative pathways’ for moving Ireland’s energy systems away from fossil fuels to renewable sources such as solar and wind power. To address such complicated challenges, Rogan says, “you have to engage the head and the heart, and I find poetry is a good way to bridge those two”.
Poetry, he says, “is about looking seriously at the world and seeing what’s right in front of you, but you’ve forgotten to notice”. Rogan often finds himself concocting short, three-line haiku poems in his head as he cycles to and from his home in Cork to the university, a commute of about 10 kilometres each way. Some of his poems address people’s unsustainable driving habits. For instance, in one of his favourite haiku, he wrote,
If I saw myself/ As some motorists see me/ I wouldn’t see me
Many of his haiku and haibun — a type of poem that interweaves prose with haiku — address the climate footprint of travel and the mental-health benefits of cycling past “buses, cars, vans queuing in abundance”.
Rogan hosts a podcast on renewable-energy poetry. He is compiling an anthology of such poems by other scribes that find beauty in the “technological sublime, the feelings of awe we get when we look at huge human-made pieces of technology”. Both poetry and engineering share “a similar aesthetic of economy”, he explains. “An elegant solution or an elegant equation can be a kind of poem.”
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One of the poems that Rogan selected for his energy collection is In Praise of Pylons by Victoria Gatehouse, a clinical operations manager at ICON, a biotechnology research firm in Dublin. Gatehouse, who lives on the outskirts of Halifax, UK, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, is the author of The Hawthorn Bride (2024), a collection of poems “rooted in a Yorkshire landscape of crags, moorland, reservoirs and woods”. She also wrote a forthcoming poetry book for children, Aardvark Day, which centres around quirky animals such as a photosynthetic sea slug known as a leaf sheep (Costasiella kuroshimae) and the bioluminescent deep-sea jellyfish (Atolla wyvillei).
“I am a lyric poet, so my aim is to make things beautiful or give a sense of awe and wonder,” Gatehouse says. In her poem about the electric pylons, inspired by the “strange sympathy” she felt for these majestic sentinels on the moors, she wrote,
