Dr. Eva Nogales is a structural biologist whose pioneering work in cryo-electron microscopy has revealed the intricate architecture of cellular machinery. @nationalacademies.org More: explorers.com/eva-nogales/

A new year begins the way all good things do. Quietly.

Test shots with the new Leica M EV1. I'm a fan.

❤️ beautiful post about my brilliant husband @deisseroth.bsky.social ❤️

New Heroes portrait of @ardemp.bskyverified.social, a biologist who listens to the body at its most basic level, uncovering how we feel touch, pain, and temperature. His work revealed a hidden sensory language that shapes how we move through the world. @nationalacademies.org

New heroes portrait of @michellemonje.bsky.social. A physician scientist at Stanford who treats children with brain cancer and studies the disease at its source. @nationalacademies.org @nam.edu @hhmi-science.bsky.social

New heroes portrait of Dr @deisseroth.bsky.social for The @nationalacademies.org. More: explorers.com/karl-deisser... @nasonline.org @nam.edu

@deisseroth.bsky.social is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, an engineer, a clinician, and a writer...but his main focus is how the brain generates experience. Karl is building maps of the mind. Not to conquer it, but to care for it. More: explorers.com/karl-deisser... @nationalacademies.org

Karl Deisseroth Karl Deisseroth thinks with his hands as much as his mind. When I photographed him, his fingers rose instinctively to his temples, not as affectation but as posture, the way some people lean forward when listening closely. He is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, an engineer, a…

Portrait of @deisseroth.bsky.social & @michellemonje.bsky.social. Together they tell a story about how deep science is often built. Slowly. Carefully. In conversation. And sometimes, with the person you choose to build a life with. More: explorers.com/karl-deisser... @nationalacademies.org

Fun day making @nasonline.org portraits of two scientists I admire very much, @michellemonje.bsky.social & @deisseroth.bsky.social @nam.edu

Dr. Walter Alvarez is best known for his role in uncovering the asteroid impact hypothesis that explains the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. More: explorers.com/walter-alvar...

Rodney Brooks has long been an advocate of building intelligence from the ground up rather than imposing it from above. His work in embodied cognition and behavior-based robotics has reshaped the field of robotics. More: explorers.com/rodney-brooks/

The sea flexes beneath our boots, reminding everyone that this is not solid ground, just a temporary agreement. Exploration here is not about conquering anything. It is about standing still long enough to feel how thin the margin is between presence and disappearance.

If you're interested in reading about some of the most inspiring scientists working today, you might enjoy this: www.Explorers.com. @nationalacademies.org @nasonline.org

Sea and sky folding into each other. Just layers of cold light and dark water sliding past, the planet breathing slowly. I remember thinking how thin the boundary is between things we name and things we feel. Arctic Ocean, somewhere north of everything.

An Icelandair 757 rests on Union Glacier’s blue ice runway, a commercial jet improbably parked at the bottom of the world. Antarctica has a way of making even a jetliner feel ephemeral, a visitor allowed in only briefly before the cold takes everything back. #photography

Kati Karikó & Susan Francia Kati Karikó and Susan Francia, mother and daughter, both medalists in the most literal sense. Karikó won the Nobel Prize for discoveries that made mRNA vaccines possible, work she carried forward for decades before the world understood what it would become. Francia won…

Meet MIT's newest Dean of Engineering: Paula Hammond. explorers.com/paula-hammon... Photographed for @nationalacademies.org.

Kip Thorne Kip Thorne is a theoretical physicist whose work reshaped our understanding of spacetime, black holes, and the fabric of the universe. A longtime professor at Caltech, he co-founded LIGO and helped lead the effort that first detected gravitational waves, confirming a century-old…

Kip Thorne is a theoretical physicist whose work reshaped our understanding of spacetime, black holes, and the fabric of the universe. @nationalacademies.org More: explorers.com/kip-thorne/

W.E. Moerner is a physicist whose work has allowed humanity to peer into the infinitesimal, revealing a universe of single molecules that had long remained invisible. Photographed for the @nationalacademies.org. More: explorers.com/w-e-moerner/

Union Glacier, Antarctica. 79°46S 82°52W. We move along the blue ice, heads down, breath freezing as it leaves the body. The cold here is not sharp. It is deep and steady, soaking through layers and time.

Chuan He listens to the quiet chemistry of RNA. Small molecular marks, vast biological consequences. Professor of Chemistry, University of Chicago. @nationalacademies.org

Professor @neilshubin.bsky.social sits in the quiet glow of his University of Chicago lab with the bones of Tiktaalik under the scope. The fossil he helped discover in the Arctic. Part fish and part early walker. A clean hinge between water and land. @nationalacademies.org @nasonline.org

"In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth." - New Heroes portrait of @nobelprize.org Laureate & University of Chicago Professor, Jack Szostak, for the @nationalacademies.org & the @nasonline.org

[email protected] helped reveal one of evolution’s great transitions through the discovery of Tiktaalik, spending years tracing how fins became limbs and how our own bodies carry the imprint of ancient fish. He's been nominated to become the next president of the @nationalacademies.org

Chuan He is the chemist who helped show that our genes are not fixed instructions but living information shaped by tiny chemical marks. His work revealed that cells can add and remove methyl groups on DNA and RNA, a discovery that opened the fields of epigenetics and RNA epigenetics.

Chuan He Chuan He works at the edge of a quiet revolution in biology. For decades scientists believed that DNA carried its code in a fixed way and that RNA simply carried out the instructions. Chuan helped show that life is more fluid. Chemical marks can be added or removed from DNA and RNA,…

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak has spent his life circling one of the oldest questions in science. How does life begin. Not as metaphor, but as chemistry that somehow learns to copy itself and change. @nationalacademies.org @krishnanyamuna.bsky.social More: explorers.com/jack-szostak/

Professor @krishnanyamuna.bsky.social builds molecular reporters that survive inside living cells to send back data. Her inspired work at U of Chicago shows us the chemical maps of our own biology. It is delicate work with heavy implications. She is watching life happen from the inside out.

Some people build careers. Others build bridges. @djpatil.bsky.social does both. Most know him as the pioneering data scientist who shaped the role of Chief Data Scientist for the United States. More: explorers.com/dj-patil-the...

Three Glaciers is about as remote as it gets. A handful of tents perched on hard blue ice, tucked between the ridgelines where three glaciers meet. Quiet, cold, and a long way from anywhere. #Antarctica #Photography

Dr David Baltimore spent a lifetime shaping molecular biology and immunology in ways that changed how we understand life at its most elemental scale. explorers.com/david-baltim...

Rick Prelinger Rick Prelinger has spent his life chasing the things most people throw away. He treats discarded film reels, fading pamphlets, lost newsreels, and forgotten home movies as if they were rare minerals in the deeper layers of culture. For him, history is not the polished version that…

I made these portraits of @alexhonnold.bsky.social at Union Glacier in Antarctica just after he came down from Mount Vinson. He warmed his hands, cracked a smile, and you could feel it in the room that he was already thinking about heading back out into the white.

[email protected] is an astronomer at Caltech whose discoveries reshaped our understanding of the solar system. His work played a central role in the reclassification of Pluto. Brown now searches for the unseen giant that may be hiding far beyond Neptune, a hypothetical world known as Planet 9

Early evening at Embarcadero Center. A simple moment where the architecture shows its scale without trying. San Francisco. Hasselblad X2D II.

Grateful for Sadie!

Gratitude: www.instagram.com/reel/DRSVc7k...

Kristen Edwards Marquardt has spent her life working at the edge of national security and technology. She has served as an intelligence advisor at Homeland Security, as a staff member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and earlier as an operations officer at the CIA.

Magical Yosemite

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?" - Out of Africa

Dark water stretching out toward the rim of the world, sky pressed low, a hint of light slipping through the storm. Svalbard keeping her secrets. #photography

ceanic hush silver breath on restless waves night folds into mist

Dr Joanne Chory was one of the great plant biologists of our time. She spent her career uncovering how plants sense and adapt to their world, work that reshaped climate science and agriculture. Sharp mind, bright spirit, standing here at the @salkinstitute.bsky.social. @nationalacademies.org

Daniel Ellsberg spent his life urging America to choose truth over power. A whistleblower who carried the weight of a nation and still found room for gentleness. Here with Patricia, his companion through it all. Remembered for courage, conscience, and a heart that stayed open to the end.

Bob Behnken: Engineer, astronaut, quiet force in the American space program. He’s flown on two Shuttle missions, helped bring Crew Dragon into the world, and spent long hours working in the guts of spacecraft most of us will only ever see in museums. @nationalacademies.org

Dr. Jacques Vallée is a scientist & iconoclast whose work spans astrophysics, computing, and the study of unexplained aerial phenomena. It is no accident that he became the real-life inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

W. E. Moerner sits in a cave of circuitry and paper, a tight little world of wires, radios, bright drawers, and half finished projects. Hard to believe this quiet corner belongs to a Nobel Prize winning chemist who showed the world that a single molecule could be seen.