Tri-County RVTHS Students’ Art Brings Life to New ThermoFisher Lab

ThermoFisher Scientific recently opened a 290,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Plainville, MA. The new facility will be used for manufacturing life-saving gene therapy products that will impact patients all over the world. In order to decorate the Quality Control (QC) testing hallway, ThermoFisher created a SmART Contest open to students ages 13-18 and our students answered the call.

Science themed art work created by contest winner Sinead Bergeron of Medway and runner-ups Catriona Keefe of Wrentham, Morgan Fleury of North Attleboro, and Alexander Vasilyev of Walpole line the QC Hallway and have also been utilized as decals to add color throughout the lab. The students were tasked with creating either computer generated graphics or hand-drawn images and explaining how the artwork displays “science” to them. “You have some amazingly talented students!” commented Marcia Goff, Director of External Communications for Pharma Services at Thermo Fisher Scientific.

The students and their guardians were invited to the ribbon cutting ceremony in August to celebrate the official opening of the new facility. Attendance at the ribbon cutting included: former Gov. Charlie Baker, Attleboro area Congressman Jake Auchincloss, Senator Becca Rausch, and State Representative Shawn Dooley. During the ceremony the four Tri-County students were honored for their works of art which reflect the company’s research efforts.
“Our students utilized the skills they have gained from Graphic Communications to clearly portray their idea of ‘science.’ It is interesting to see the range of ideas that were born for the open-ended contest,” said Linda Thompson, Graphic Communications instructor.

The state-of-the-art site was purpose-built for large-scale manufacturing. It will offer a flexible and scalable configuration of laboratory and production suites co-located with adjacent warehousing and office space.
“All 16 of the Career Majors offered at Tri-County have a foundation in STEAM education. The incorporation of critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving helps prepare our students to be innovators and combine left and right brain thinking. It is an honor to have our students’ artwork hanging in the halls of a state-of-the-art facility for a worldwide leader in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Dr. Karen Maguire, Superintendent/Director, Tri-County RVTHS.