Six questions for the new professor – meet Peter Vilhelm Skov

What do you think about being appointed Professor?
“I think it’s a great honor and recognition. In addition to my research, I have contributed to the start-up and ongoing development of our teaching, and it’s nice that this work has helped to qualify me as a professor.”

Peter Vilhelm Skov is a biologist from the University of Copenhagen. He subsequently obtained a PhD at the University of Queensland in Australia. Peter Vilhelm Skov was employed at the University of Copenhagen for a number of years, while living in Helsingor. In 2009, Peter Vilhelm Skov then got a job at DTU Aqua in Hirtshals, where DTU Aqua has locations for aquaculture and fisheries technology, and moved to the North of Jutland.

Would you like to describe your research in a few lines?
“My research is mainly centered around fish energetics, i.e. fish energy consumption, and I mainly work with it within aquaculture. However, from time to time I also collaborate with colleagues who work with wild fish.

For farmed fish, it is largely about how farming conditions affect fish metabolism. Farming conditions can be anything from the physical and chemical properties of their environment, for example water flow rates and temperature, or the amount of dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in the water.

It can also be more biologically oriented, such as densities of fish, their nutritional status, or the composition of their feed. The measured parameters can be energy consumption, where oxygen uptake is used as a proxy, or classic growth studies, such as daily growth, feed intake and turnover.

But it can also be more specific, such as energy turnover in different tissue types, correlated with changes in, for example, mitochondrial densities or enzyme activities. Feed composition and the amount of feed are also significant factors that affect the fish's energy consumption, where it gets its energy from, and how it adapts its entire digestive system.”

How will your research area at the department develop after your professorship?
“Overall, I would like it to continue to develop as it has over the past 10 years. It has become more versatile, as more tools have been added to the toolbox and a larger collaboration network has been established.

Ideally, I would like my research to be a good combination of the cognitive and the applied.

I am extremely happy to do research that has the potential to solve specific problems.

Of course, it starts with identifying the problem and sometimes forces you to subsequently think solution-oriented. This may mean that you have to go into somewhat unknown territory, or draw on the skills of other colleagues.

In particular, the collaboration, both within and across departments, is something I would like to further develop."

Now I would like to take you on a big leap back in time and hear where your interest in marine life started?
“That's probably the classic. My parents had a boat, and as a child I spent all my summers sailing around Danish waters.

It quickly turned into fishing for crabs and fish, a growing interest in fish, an aquarium in my room, and so on. What sprouted in me as an adult was a curiosity about "how fish work". There is enormous diversity in fish and the environments they live in, which have forced some absolutely phenomenal adaptations.

From white-blooded fish in Antarctica that live below freezing to apia in Lake Magadi that live at 40 degrees and a pH of 10. These are of course extremes, but in between there are countless other ingenious adaptations.

Many of the adaptations that fish are capable of are also relevant to aquaculture. My interest in fish farming came later, and is, at least in part, driven by the fact that I find it exciting to work with fish physiology from an applied perspective.”