Postdoctoral fellow Madeline Meier interacting with museum visitors at the Meet a Scientist: Birds of a feather: a microscopic look at kingfisher coloration event at the Field Museum of Natural History.
Madeline Meier is a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University’s Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, a collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago. A 2017 chemistry graduate of the University of Arkansas, she credits her undergraduate experience and the mentorship and opportunities she received through the Honors College with shaping her interdisciplinary approach to research. After earning her Ph.D. in chemistry at Caltech, where she studied how light interacts with nanostructured materials, Meier turned her focus to the arts. She now applies the same tools and techniques she used in the lab to investigate centuries-old artworks, including Qing dynasty featherworks created with the intricate tian-tsui technique, bridging chemistry, physics and art in her research.
The striking blue of the tian-tsui screen panels was visible from across the room, but closer inspection revealed just how impressive the artistry and craftsmanship were. What appeared to be continuous material resulting in the brilliant, blue coloring on the panels actually consisted of individual feather pieces meticulously adhered together. Tian-tsui is a technique that dates back over 2,000 years that involves using kingfisher feathers to create intricate designs on hairpins, jewelry, or in rarer cases larger objects such as the headdresses and screen panels I was examining. I felt incredibly lucky to be observing these objects from the Qing dynasty up close. In some ways, my research on these featherworks seemed far off from what I had been recently exploring as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
When I started my postdoctoral fellowship at the Northwestern University / Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, I began a collaboration with the Field Museum of Natural History investigating kingfisher featherworks fabricated via tian-tsui. Here my background came full circle, as one facet of the project involved understanding the structural color of kingfisher feathers. Structural color, in contrast to dyes and pigments, stems from ordered micro and nanoscale features and is frequently found in nature (e.g., morpho butterfly wings and peacock feathers). In studying the feathers’ structural color, I relied on techniques both new and routine to me. Optical scatterometry measurements, a technique with which I was quickly becoming familiar, helped our team better understand how the blue coloring of the feathers changed based on the lighting conditions and observation angle. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), a technique I am well versed in from my time in graduate school, aided in the characterization of nanoscale features responsible for generating the characteristic kingfisher blue coloring.
SEM is my tool of choice to examine objects and their features at extreme magnifications, whether it be for observing the microscopic structure of a kingfisher feather or characterizing nanostructured films as I did as a graduate student. My work throughout my PhD in Professor Nate Lewis’ group at Caltech focused on investigating a template-free method to nanostructure semiconducting materials coined inorganic phototropic growth. In this light-mediated electrodeposition process the light source conditions (e.g., wavelength, polarization, and angle) impact the resulting film morphology. Understanding the underlying, fundamental light-matter interactions that direct the growth process and how those phenomena related to changes in feature size, spacing, and orientation relied heavily on SEM for the visualization of nanoscale features as well as numerous other characterization and computational methods.
Tian-tsui objects featured at the Meet a Scientist exhibit displaying the complexity and intricacy of the tian-tsui craft.
Credit: Emmanuel Meenattoor, Field Museum
As my graduate student career progressed, I began to explore possible career paths and was brought back to my time at the U o fA. During my undergraduate studies as a chemistry major, I minored in sustainability. The interdisciplinary focus of the sustainability field drew me to it. In searching for my next steps post graduate school, I sought to explore avenues that have that same interdisciplinary component I valued. Hearing of the field of cultural heritage science, the scientific investigation of cultural heritage objects and artefacts, I was fascinated. Still, I was unsure if it would be possible to pursue this field given my past studies and current research. Reaching out to conservators and scientists in cultural heritage, I better understood how they got involved in cultural heritage and what research questions they investigated. I was thrilled to learn that while it would be a large pivot, the same techniques, methodologies, and instrumentation I was familiar with could be put to use on these objects with new and exciting challenges. Cultural heritage science has exactly the interdisciplinary focus I wanted.
Entering my final year of my postdoctoral fellowship I am excited to see what new projects and through these projects what new challenges await. Just in September, I had the opportunity to share my work on kingfisher featherworks at an “Meet a Scientist” Grainger Science Hub exhibit at The Field Museum where I interacted with museum visitors and shared a behind-the-scenes look into the fascinating research and field of cultural heritage science.