Scientist equally at ease in rainforest, on runway
On a recent morning in Chicago, the weather was warm and wet.
Susan Finkbeiner trudged around the University of Chicago campus in rain boots — footwear the scientist relies on when doing fieldwork in the Amazon rainforest, a world away from where she works.
Only days earlier, however, the 30-yearold Finkbeiner had been striding in 6-inch heels, tending to the other half of her “double life.”
Besides studying tropical butterflies in her work at the University of Chicago, she works as a model, jetting away some weekends to walk international runways.
“It’s this crazy Cinderella story,” Finkbeiner said. “One month, I’m literally knee-deep in mud and covered in rain and romping through the jungle, (and), five months later, I’m training to be a runway model. It’s absolutely insane.”
Last month in London, she walked for nine designers in two shows during Fashion Week. Leaving Chicago on a Wednesday redeye flight, she revised two research papers on the plane and arrived Thursday, in plenty of time for Friday fittings. She spent hours on Saturday morning having her hair and makeup done, then walked in multiple shows that afternoon and evening.
“It’s just rush, rush, rush,” she said. “What got me hooked was the moment you step out, and it’s just lights, there’s music, but you just hear the flick of the cameras, and you just see a whole slew of photographers at the end of the runway,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I feel famous.’”
The two areas of work are similar in some ways but disparate in others.
“I’m used to being in front of crowds for speaking — at conferences and lecturing and that sort of thing — but this was so different. And I loved it because it was so different.”
In high school, Finkbeiner participated in beauty pageants but never modeled. During her fieldwork, while walking rainforests throughout Ecuador, she said, someone told her that she should consider modeling.
At the time, she was at Boston University, working as a researcher after having earned her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Irvine. She met with a modeling agency that began sending her to shows.
“The modeling is something that’s outof-this-world fun,” she said. “It’s an adrenaline rush.”
The day after her shows in London, she took a flight to O’Hare International Airport and was back at work Monday at the University of Chicago.
In her workspace at the university’s Kronforst Laboratory, where she is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, she showed visitors Heliconius butterflies pinned in drawers, marveling at their beauty.
She has received grants and honors from the Smithsonian Institution and National Science Foundation, and her research aims to understand animal evolution across varying geographic areas.
At the university greenhouse, on the top of a nearby building, she explained the different types of live butterflies. Black butterflies fluttered around inside their mesh homes, resting on branches. Finkbeiner pulled one out, carefully capturing it by gently folding its wings together, to reveal its patterns.
Since her childhood in Rockford, Illinois, she said, she has loved watching the Discovery Channel, which introduced her to science. And she loved bugs. “I was obsessed with them. I always had jars full of bugs with me.”
She wants young girls to know that they can play in the dirt and study bugs and even grow up to work with them.
Occasionally, the worlds of science and fashion have collided.
Arriving at Heathrow Airport in London for Fashion Week, she grabbed a copy of BBC Focus Magazine that included an article she’d written. Recently, she taped an interview for an upcoming PBS “Nature” episode, “Sex, Lies and Butterflies,” which will air in April.
While in London examining a flowing outfit for a show by designer Jolie, she said, she was delighted to find that the overthrow had a butterfly within its intricate beading.
“It was totally by chance.”