For Susan Finkbeiner, wearing rain boots to trudge around the University of Chicago campus was a familiar feeling.
After all, the 30-year-old scientist does fieldwork in the Amazon rain forest, trudging around in the rain a world away from Chicago.
That morning, she pulled on rain boots. But days earlier, she'd been striding in 6-inch heels. That's because she lives what she refers to as a double life — she is both a scientist at the University of Chicago studying tropical butterflies and a model who jets away for the weekend to walk on international runways.
"It's this crazy Cinderella story. One month, I'm literally knee-deep in mud and covered in rain and romping through the jungle," she said. "Five months later, I'm training to be a runway model."
In February, Finkbeiner walked for nine designers in two shows during London's Fashion Week. Leaving Chicago on a red-eye flight, she revised two research papers on the plane. At Heathrow, she grabbed a copy of BBC Focus Magazine that included an article she'd written.
After hours getting her hair and makeup done, she spent the afternoon and evening walking in multiple shows.
She said, "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."
She said that during her fieldwork, walking rain forests throughout Ecuador, someone said she should consider modeling. At the time, she was at Boston University, where she worked as a researcher after getting her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine. She met with a modeling agency that began sending her to shows. "The modeling is something that's out-of-this-world fun," she said.
