The winning photos of the DNRF Photo Competition 2021 have been chosen

The DNRF Photo Competition 2021

In 2018, the Danish National Research Foundation launched a photo competition to connect the world of research with the public. The competition was a great success, and since then, scientists from the Danish scientific environment have competed for the first, second, and third prizes. Below you can see the winning pictures from 2021 as well as 10 other fascinating photos submitted to this year’s competition.

Photos have the ability to uncover the world of science in a surprising and inviting way, by revealing its beauty and fascinating appeal. The DNRF would like to share with a broader audience how, each day, scientific discovery advances our knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in, by telling the stories of scientific advances or discoveries with a photo as a visual entry point.

For the third year in a row, the foundation has launched a photo competition based on the potential of photography as documentation and communication of research.

Below, you can see the winning pictures, and further down you can see a number of additional 10 photos carefully selected by the judges.

Selection criteria:
- Degree to which the photo evokes emotions in the observer
- Degree to which the photo works as visual entry point to the story behind the specific research result
- Aesthetic quality of the photo
The panel
- Christine Buhl Andersen, Chair of the New Carlsberg Foundation
- Louise Wolthers, Research Manager/Curator at the Hasselblad Foundation
- Minik Rosing, Professor at GLOBE Institute, vice chair aof the DNRF board and board member at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

**1st Prize: Knowledge, Morten Skovdal, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen**

The picture shows a radio on the ground in front of a building in Zimbabwe. Photo: “Knowledge”/Morten Skovdal

The panel’s review: This is an interesting picture that clearly shows that research involves citizens. The local people of Zimbabwe go from being research objects to being active contributors. The easy access to photography means that locals can document their everyday lives and, in this case, how the radio can be used to create knowledge about HIV, or potentially COVID, which can be shared in areas where access to other media does not exist. The image evokes memories of the pioneers of color art photography like Eggleston and is beautiful and evocative without pretension.

**2nd Prize: THE RACE, Carsten Egevang, researcher at** Greenland Institute of Natural Resources

The image was shot in Ilulissat, Greenland in March 2018 during the annual national sled dog race. Photo: Carsten Egevang

The panel’s review: This image is immediately captivating, and only on closer inspection does it reveal that the objects are dog sleds on the ice. The motif seems familiar, without your being able to see clearly what it represents: – Are they ducks on a lake? Birds in flight? Or plow furrows in a windswept snowy landscape? The image is extremely well composed and gives an immediate impression of speed across the field. The underlying research project is fascinating in its interdisciplinary breadth.

**3rd Prize: Perfect Cast, Heide W. Nørgaard, Archaeometallurgist/postdoc researcher, Moesgaard Museum**

The image shows the crystallographic structure of a perfectly cast 3000-year-old bronze figure from the Sardinian Nurage culture. Photo: Heide Nørgaard

The panel’s review: The image, with its colorful abstract topography, is immediately captivating. It illustrates the professionalism of a bronze caster 3000 years ago and, at the same time, provides a microstructural insight into the materiality of the bronze. It challenges our notion that today’s technological prowess is necessarily higher than that of the past. This project emphasizes that the past can show the way to the solution of today’s problems, but that today’s technology is necessary to understand the past. Past and present thus meet in this photo.

10 photos selected by the panel

The panel has also highlighted 10 photos, which according to the panel, all made a special impression. See the selected pictures in the gallery below.

Gallery with a selection of 10 additional photos chosen by the panel

The Lotus japonicus plants in the picture lack a receptor and therefore cannot establish root nodule symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. We created variants of the missing receptor and express it, along with a yellow fluorescent protein, in the root.

Photo: Christina Krönauer, Aarhus University

The glass capillary in the foreground carries cooled hydrogen atoms to react with a thin film of carbon-based molecules, grown on the gold crystal at the center of the image. The experiments take place under ultra-high vacuum conditions with pressures 100 billion times lower that atmospheric pressure, and at liquid nitrogen temperature, to model the conditions under which chemistry happens in space.

Photo: InterCat, Institut for Fysik og Astronomi, Aarhus Universitet

Red light rooms help keep photoreceptors from activating, so that rodent models can be living at ‘night’ while scientists work in the ‘day’. This image comes from an experiment to better understand the effects of time of exercise on metabolism. The lighting seems to create surreal world where time is suspended or manipulated as a variable of scientific enquiry.

Photo: Isabella Martin & Kristin Hussey, Ph.D.-student and Postdoc, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, Medical Museion

Two laser setups for laser cooling of positively charged barium ions to be used in neutral-ion hybrid experiments at temperatures of a millionth of a degree above absolute zero

Photo: Center for Complex Quantum Systems, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University

This image depicts a mouse egg which is undergoing meiosis – a specialized type of cell division, which halves the chromosome content of the cell to prepare it for fertilization.

Photo: Miya Kudo Høffding, Postdoc, Center for Chromosome Stability, University of Copenhagen

Watching over the young ones – A cross section through the thale cress fruit – called a silique – reveals transporters (green) that load a “survival kit” of food and defense compounds into the developing plant embryos, here seen as the magenta centers of the two round seeds.

Photo: Niels Christian Sanden Ph.D.-student, DynaMo, Dept. of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen

The image shows a transverse head section of a 3 days old zebrafish larvae, that has microcephaly.

Photo: Canan Doganli, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen

This image depicts the flowery structure of the cosmic velocity field in our local Universe. By fitting a complex model of cosmic dynamics to galaxy positions in the sky as charted by galaxy surveys, we reconstruct the velocity field via a high-dimensional parameter inference problem (order of 10 million free parameters) using cutting-edge statistical inference and AI technology developed within the Aquila Consortium.

Photo: Dr. Doogesh Kodi Ramanah DARK Research Fellow DARK, the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen

The picture shows the calving front of the Greenland Ice Shield in Melville Bay seen from a helicopter perspective during fieldwork.

Photo: Anne Sofie Søndergaard, postdoc.Dept. for Geoscience, Aarhus University

The image depicts fluorescently labelled rhizobia excessively invading roots of a mutant plant deficient in the hormonal regulation of the infection thread formation.

Photo: Marcin Nadzieja Aarhus University,Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics

More information about the photo competition from Videskab.dk (in Danish) here

The winning photos of the DNRF Photo Competition 2021 have been chosen

The DNRF Photo Competition 2021

Selection criteria:

The panel

1st Prize: Knowledge, Morten Skovdal, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen

2nd Prize: THE RACE, Carsten Egevang, researcher at Greenland Institute of Natural Resources

3rd Prize: Perfect Cast, Heide W. Nørgaard, Archaeometallurgist/postdoc researcher, Moesgaard Museum

10 photos selected by the panel

Gallery with a selection of 10 additional photos chosen by the panel

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**1st Prize: Knowledge, Morten Skovdal, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen**

**2nd Prize: THE RACE, Carsten Egevang, researcher at** Greenland Institute of Natural Resources

**3rd Prize: Perfect Cast, Heide W. Nørgaard, Archaeometallurgist/postdoc researcher, Moesgaard Museum**