Tierney Thys, PhD
TIERNEY THYS wears many hats. She is a science media producer and communicator who is also engaged in multiple scientific research projects. The curiously shaped ocean sunfish is one of her signature marine projects. As Senior Editor, Tierney is currently putting together the first big academic book on the sunfish, featuring contributing authors from all over the world. Students will be able to read up on various study themes including reproduction, anatomy, locomotion, fisheries, and toxins, and each chapter will end with a list of scientific questions still needing to be answered. This will help focus students so they will be able to hit the ground running.
Tierney was born in San Leandro, California, but at the age of ten moved with her family to the teeny, land-locked town of Norwich, Vermont where she grew up. She did her undergraduate work at Brown University in Rhode Island where she received a degree in biology. Following graduation, Tierney returned to California for several years where she worked for Sylvia Earle. Tierney then attended graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina and earned her doctorate in zoology investigating the mechanics of swimming muscles in fish, before returning to California again.
Tierney first visited Monterey when her sister attended boarding school in the area, well before the Monterey Bay Aquarium was built. She remembers Cannery Row, which was ultimately transformed into the Aquarium and neighboring shops, as a stinky place back then.
During her first year in graduate school, Tierney came and did research at the Aquarium, which was just getting ready to display ocean sunfish. She had already developed an interest in them, and the Aquarium had some in captivity that she could study. That was in the early 90s. Tierney worked with the sunfish for a semester, but couldn’t quite develop her efforts into a PhD project.
Following graduate school Tierney returned once more to Monterey. There she was involved in film-making at Sea Studios located next door to the Aquarium and was able to continue her unwavering interest in sunfish again. Tierney fell for them, as they are such an unusual fish. In graduate school she was studying biomechanics and looking at form and function, and looked at this odd-shaped fish and wondered why they had left their tales behind! Tierney describes them as an abridged oddity, a curtailed colossus. Yet, she says that when you see them swimming in the wild, they are just beautiful and graceful, a thing of majesty. They have this major contradiction – they look so cumbersome and yet they are so graceful. For the biomechanist, they were the perfect animal to study.
Concurrent with her ongoing research on sunfish, Tierney has spent ten years involved in filmmaking. Frustrated with the loss of whole biology courses at the university level where studies in mammalogy, entomology and the like have been replaced by genetics, she was happy to join the team at Sea Studios in making a documentary series aimed at reinvigorating interest in whole organism systems. The series, entitled Shape of Life, had 8 episodes—each one focused on a different phylum. The second series she worked on, Strange Days on Planet Earth, was about environmental issues from climate change to water borne pollutants. As Tierney notes, when you work in marine sciences you can’t turn a blind eye to the impacts we’re having on the planet. She has consequently gotten more and more interested in conservation and conservation messaging.
Tierney currently has several grants from National Geographic looking at how our brain responds to nature imagery and also the effects of offering nature imagery to nature-deprived populations, such as the incarcerated. She is exploring the question of how do we take the natural world that we’ve captured in our cameras and use it as a messaging tool to lessen our impacts.
