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 clinician, and a writer, but those labels only begin to describe what he has been doing for the past two decades.

Dr. Walter Alvarez is a geologist whose work has rewritten the story of Earth’s past. Best known for his role in uncovering the asteroid impact hypothesis that explains the mass extinction of the d…

I photographed Dr. Rodney Brooks on September 17, 2021, at his high-rise condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. The soft light filtered through the large windows, casting a warm glow as we sat d…

Explore Dr. Paula Hammond's groundbreaking work in nanomaterials and her influential role at MIT in engineering education and mentorship.

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 two Olympic gold medals as a rower, first in Beijing and again in London, earning her place through years of early mornings and relentless repetition on the water.

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 prediction of Einstein and opening an entirely new way of observing the cosmos. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 and has spent a career asking how the universe actually behaves at its most extreme limits, from warped spacetime to colliding black holes.