Keira Lee Rice

One of the many delights of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in Zürich was happening just off to the side of the main stage.

From my seat in the balcony, I could see Keira Lee Rice standing stage right beside a large chalkboard. Each time a new Ig Nobel Prize was announced, Rice began to draw. She had only a few minutes. While the winners were being introduced and their wonderfully improbable research explained, lines appeared rapidly across the blackboard. About three minutes later, there it was: a finished drawing that somehow captured the essence—and the humor—of the research we had just heard about.

Rice is particularly well suited to the assignment because she belongs to both worlds represented by the Ig Nobels: science and art. She is a developmental biologist as well as an artist, and her association with the Ig Nobels began in 2024, at the ceremony at MIT, she experimented with live-illustrating each of the ten prize-winning achievements on a blackboard. The idea worked so well that live drawing crossed the Atlantic Ocean this year. Rice also created the evocative logo for the 2026 ceremony, the first held in Europe after 35 years in the United States.

Rice had to identify its central idea, find the joke hidden within it, translate all of that into a visual image, and then execute the drawing while the ceremony continued around her before the awardees left the podium. 

Her pictures captured the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prizes themselves: research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Rice managed to accomplish much the same thing—with chalk, a blackboard, and about three minutes.

I photographed every one of her finished drawings. Here they are.

Soil Science Prize — For burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and digging them up two months later to assess soil health.

Peace Prize — For documenting that people value friends who behave viciously toward people they dislike.

Olfaction Prize — For collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents—but teenagers do not.

Technology Prize — For pioneering “necroprinting”: using mosquito proboscises as high-resolution nozzles for 3D printing.

Physics Prize — For theoretical and experimental work aimed at designing a splash-free urinal.

Biology Prize — For repeatedly and gently stepping on venomous snakes, under varying conditions, to determine what does and does not provoke them to bite humans.

Medicine Prize — Awarded posthumously to Tokuji Unno for an aerodynamic study of how to blow the human nose.

Chemistry Prize — For discovering that milk proteins produced by viviparous cockroaches contain about three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.

Economics Prize — For amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to take candy intended for children and engage in other forms of unethical behavior

Biomechanics Prize — For devising a more precise scientific definition of kissing by comparing kissing behavior in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.