JENNIFER MORTENSENIt was a case of mistaken identity of Internet-size proportions. Last Saturday afternoon, just around the time that Heather Heyer, a counter-protester to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, lost her life to a Nazi sympathizer who plowed his car through a crowd, Kyle Quinn returned a call from an unknown number on his cell phone.
A member of the university relations office at the University of Arkansas, where Quinn runs a biomedical engineering lab, was on the other end of the line. She informed him that he had been identified as one of the white nationalist marchers—photographed with tiki torch and red Arkansas Engineering t-shirt—in Charlottesville the night before.
“I was just shocked,” Quinn tells The Scientist. “I didn’t really know how bad things were going to get.”
Quinn’s lab researches wound healing, focusing on diagnosing diabetic foot ulcers using multi-photon microscopy. Part of his work is developing methods to take subjectivity out of diagnostic image analysis—“which is kind of ironic, given the situation I’m in.”
Quinn’s first concern when he heard he’d been fingered as a white nationalist marcher ...
