Department of Chemistry faculty have interests beyond science that include running, aviation, woodworking, cooking, travel, and many others. Some use time away from the lab to let their minds wander and explore questions related to chemistry, while others take time away from science to lose themselves in a completely different world. The common thread? They approach their hobbies like they approach their science…with enthusiasm and passion. For a Badger Chemist, would we expect anything less?
It’s the middle of a summer night, and Professor Bob Hamers is in his backyard watching the sky and waiting patiently in a lawn chair. Mosquitoes have long since disappeared, leaving the night calm and cool with Bob and his astrophotography equipment: a telescope working on a equatorial mount that tracks the stars as the earth moves on its axis, a full-frame camera that captures 75-megabyte images, filters to narrow not only the light pollution but specific wavelengths to look selectively at hydrogen, oxygen, or sulfur, and a second guide camera to piggyback the main scope sending a signal to keep it in position for long exposures. He’s alone in the dark, photographing light from a celestial object that has taken tens of thousands of years to reach his backyard. Yet, his mind is there, in his backyard, focused on capturing that one image that sometimes can take multiple days to achieve. “It’s often meditative,” Bob explains, “being outside at night when I’m the only one around.”
As a painter, Professor Silvia Cavagnero knows the idea of losing herself in what she enjoys. “There are a lot of technical aspects of art, but most of it is just not worrying about the logic,” Silvia reflects. As a child, she was interested in both art and music and tried her hand at both before setting them aside to focus on science. Comparing the two, Silvia recalls that she had always enjoyed the carefree expression of art, and it’s what drew her back to it later in life. “I did a lot of music. I performed and took exams in the conservatory, and decided it was not coming naturally to me,” she reflected. “With visual arts, I just feel like I can let my mind go.” Here, Silvia sees parallels between her science and her art. “I am usually a very broad person, and I need to have a list to stay focused….But when I am on the verge of a discovery in science, writing a paper, or doing art, I am so focused,” she explains. “I think it’s really a blessing.” In the quiet of a flower patch, avid gardener Professor Jen
Schomaker finds that allowing her mind to wander while she prunes and pulls weeds gives her time to think about questions from students and problems she needs to work through in the lab. “When I’m gardening, I’m thinking about new ideas or a question a student asked me that day,” Jen says, “It’s just something that can clear my mind, allows me to rejuvenate and be creative.” She also enjoys giving back to the community. Chemistry personnel and graduate students enjoy boxes of corn, peppers, basil, peaches, tomatoes, and other fresh produce given to the department from Jen’s gardening efforts.
Those efforts are guided by shared knowledge that she uses in both her science and her gardening. “I think you have to be very patient with your research, and you have to be patient with your plants.” A scientist has to understand the whole idea of reaction design or optimization, understanding what goes into the product. For gardening, this means thinking about the soil, the temperature, what types of plants, and what solid additives Jen chooses. “You don’t just stick the seed in the ground. You have to think about it the same way when you’re trying to design your reactions,” Jen says. “Think about things like solvents and catalysts, did you purify your materials, how much reaction time, and are you checking things periodically?” Design optimization aside, Jen admits that gardening can sometimes involve more factors out of her control, such as weather and pests.
“I use specific arrangements of atoms as a motif in my synthetic projects to build a diverse set of new compounds just the same way you could use a collection of notes as a motif to build out a theme and variations.” — Professor John Berry
composing music informally in the fifth grade.
For Professor John Berry, the lines between science and chemistry are blurred. His passion for music began in fifth grade when his mother offered him the balance of a set of violin lessons, one of his brothers decided were not for him. He took to music immediately, learning viola, piano, and composing all within a few short years. As a declared chemistry major undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, John also applied to earn a composition major and was accepted into the program. John had seriously considered making music his career instead of chemistry. And as the two educational paths ran parallel, he also saw how his approaches to both music and chemistry were similar. In his training as a synthetic chemist, he believes his job is to create something new that the world has never seen before. Likewise, as a composer, John feels his job is to make something new that no one’s ever heard before. “It’s the same creative process,” he says. “I use specific arrangements of atoms as a motif in my synthetic projects to build a diverse set of new compounds just the same way you could use a collection of notes as a motif to build out a theme and variations.” And like chemistry, music follows a set of rules; in fact, sometimes, the same rules apply. Take group theory, for example. John explained that while this mathematical concept can be applied to chemistry and allows us to classify the symmetry of molecules so that different molecules have different symmetry properties, it can also be applied to musical compositions. A composer can use group theory to apply symmetry operations to collections of notes. They can be arranged in certain symmetric rhythms, or they can be organized in a musical composition method called serialism. For example, you could have a melody that is played backwards instead of forward, or inverted, where the notes go down instead of up.
Cavagnero, who says this piece was inspired “by the discovery of the unknown in new, unimaginable and unexpected places.” Credit: Silvia Cavagnero
Rules for Silvia’s art are less important. She says painting allows her to treasure the world, and she says, “re‐elaborate it with my mind in ways that nobody tells me what is right or wrong.” As a mixed media artist, her chemistry acumen has helped her understand how inks, watercolors, graphite, and oils will come together, especially when they are not meant to blend. “I think it gives me more courage to try something new.” While the rules of chemistry help, they also give her a special freedom in her art that reminds her of what drew her to it from the beginning.
It’s interesting to note that for all these faculty, these passions began as seeds at an early age. A love of music for John began in fifth grade. For Jen, her thumb began to turn green when she began to dig around in the dirt of her grandfather’s potato plot as a nine-year-old, and she nurtured her talent growing and selling cucumbers for spending money as a teenager. Silvia discovered her enjoyment of painting at the age of 10. Over many years and several obstacles, she was able to pick up a paintbrush again and has joined a group of Wisconsin artists to earn attention as an artist, earning some local awards and gallery showings. Bob’s grandfather, after retiring as a machinist, built a 10” diameter telescope that ran the length of his garage. And while Bob was only seven when his grandfather died, Bob’s uncle fostered his interest in astronomy by taking him to Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. Just a few years ago, when his uncle passed, Bob found the books that his grandfather used to build the garage telescope, along with some other items. He reflects that it all seems to be coming full circle for him. “I found this little magnifier that my grandfather made back in 1960, and I’m going to use it as part of my scope. It’s totally old school.” Bob says with enthusiasm, “I like old school.”