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Q&A with scientist Sönke Johnsen

Artsy Scientist
Dr. Sönke Johnsen will be speaking at Motorco Music Hall on Tuesday. Photo courtesy of Sönke Johnsen.

Duke biology professor Sönke Johnsen will be giving a talk about his experiences as a scientist and an artist, and where they have overlapped, at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Motorco Music Hall.

Staff writer A.J. O'Leary spoke with Johnsen about the relationship between two disciplines.

The Daily Tar Heel: What fascinates you about sea creatures and the ocean?

Dr. Sönke Johnsen: I always was, from an early age, I really liked going to the beach. I grew up in Pittsburgh, so they had steel mills and things like that, but we used to go down to the beaches in North Carolina, which I always really liked. We would go to Kill Devil Hills, and that got me at an early age. Later on as a scientist, I was more interested in the diversity of the ocean.

DTH: How did you become interested in art?

SJ: That was sort of always there too. My parents were always good with art and building things. My mom would paint and do ceramics, and my dad was very good with building things. My dad actually built most of our furniture. We didn’t have much money, so we kind of built, grew and made everything. My dad would find thrown-out telephones, and that’s how we had telephones. I just grew up always doing things with my hands, you know. Scratch the surface off any artist and you find someone interested in craftsmanship and doing things with their hands. When I was a teenager, I got into black and white photography and sculpting, and that all started just with an interest in doing things with my hands.

DTH: How did you first become interested in science?

SJ: My dad was a physicist. I grew up from an early age chatting about astrophysics and astronomy on the couch. Also then in the '70s, we were sort of in the tail end of the space race. We didn’t even pay much attention to shuttle launches recently, but the space race was a big deal. We were just glued to the TV. People were saying we were going to Mars in the '80s and the next planets in the '90s, so for me originally science was space and astronomy. They were my first love — not biology. You know Pittsburgh isn’t a very biological town. We had squirrels and pigeons and rats, but mostly it was steel mills and things and the tech industry there.

DTH: What do you research?

SJ: What do I research now? Well, life and light is kind of what we call it. We do a lot with bioluminescence. We study how animals communicate visually with each other, how animals hide from one another using light, how they use color, how that figures into the mating process.

DTH: How do you connect art with your research?

SJ: Well, the main way it's connected now, we do a lot of deep sea work, so we see a lot of stuff people don’t see — even that many scientists will never see. So we do lots of photography, which is used in outreach. We donate a lot of them to charitable trusts, and a lot of them are shown at festivals. That’s the main way now — photography. I do teach a class on art photography in lab. I teach my students to do the same thing, take pictures and then incorporate them into their research.

@aj_oleary55

arts@dailytarheel.com

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