Interview with John K. Delaney, Senior Imaging Scientist at the National Gallery of Art. He discusses the datasets he has been analyzing during the pandemic, and he recounts his childhood in Boston. Delaney describes his experience at Rockefeller University and his interest in phototherapies and measuring porphyrins under the direction of Dave Mauzerall. He discusses his postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona to study rhodopsin molecules and following the changes in protein structure after excitation by light. Delaney describes his interests in biophysics and his subsequent postdoctoral position at Johns Hopkins as an NIH fellow working in the lab of Sriram Subramaniam, before taking a job in industry as an optical engineer. He explains the circumstances of his initial involvement at the National Gallery of Art and the Gallery’s realization of the value of spectroscopy for analysis and preservation of paintings. Delaney describes how he built an expertise on hyperspectral imaging. He explains why the Gallery supported this work and how a global community developed for this field. He explains the value of his work for art authentication and the opportunities he has pursued in public outreach. At the end of the interview, Delaney explains some of the key physics concepts that inform his work, and he describes his ambition to write a book on reflectance imaging spectroscopy of paintings.
