Dawn has participated in international symposiums (2015 & 2017) in honor of Cajal held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Instituto Cajal. The conferences were organized by NINDS senior investigator Dr. Jeff Diamond and facilitated through the Instituto Cajal, the Spanish Embassy, and the NIH. During the first symposium, Bridging the Legacy of Cajal held at the NIH, she presented: "Bequeathed Aesthetics: the origins of Santiago Ramón y Cajal's artistic perceptions." In the presentation, she traced the aesthetic roots of Cajal's scientific drawings. She examined his childhood experiences and his deep connection as a youth to the novel Don Quixote and how that novel was seminal in its imagery, romanticism, individuality, and philosophy to Cajal's discovery and perception of the neuron as an individual unit. Through a comparison of Cajal's early landscape drawings to the work of Goya's sensibility, she then further connected Cajal's artistic and specific perceptual influence to the great master - an artist who was from the same region of Spain as Cajal, Aragon.
A selection of seven works from Hunter's series about Cajal is currently on display alongside the exhibition of Cajal's scientific drawings at the NIH. This exhibition is considered a living exhibit in that the drawings are changed annually.
The production of Aesthetic Instincts: the Intersection of Art and Science in the life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, is supported by funding from a Creative and Performing Arts Grant from University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, the College of Arts and Sciences, Columbia, SC, the Fulbright Foundation, Washington, D.C., and Fulbright España.
