Meet the next generation of National Geographic Explorers

These trailblazers look back in time and up into Earth’s orbit. They tackle the planet’s biggest problems and examine some of its smallest creatures.

Woman in eyeglasses with a ring on her right hand.
“I often find myself underground,” says Keneiloe Molopyane, a South African archaeologist and paleoanthropologist, “excavating fossil remains that tell the story of our deep human journey. ”The principal investigator at Gladysvale Cave, an important early homin in site in South Africa, she still thrills to the memory of finding a skull fragment one day, then finding a second and a third fragment the following day, to form an almost complete skull.
ByJordan Salama and Rachel Hartigan
Photographs byPari Dukovic
June 6, 2023
5 min read
Young athletic African man with his hands in the pockets of his white pants.
A scientist and conservationist from Kenya, Gibbs Kuguru studies the DNA of sharks to understand how humans have affected their biology. Kuguru spent his early 20s hanging out with juvenile sharks in the water every day, which “still feels surreal,” he says. Now he can be found in shark cages—his “field office”—collecting tissue samples from great whites or perhaps working on the robot he’s building to better research sharks in the wild.
Woman with short dark hair.
From her grandparents who survived the Holocaust, Victoria Herrmann learned that cultural heritage provides the necessary resilience for people to overcome existential threats. Now the U.S. geographer is applying that lesson to climate change. Her project, Preserving Legacies, helps local leaders around the world understand and manage climate impacts on their cultural sites and practices. “Climate change is, at its core, a story about the potential of losing the very things that make us who we are,” she says.
Smiling woman with long hair in satin pantsuit.
When Sophia Kianni was in middle school in the United States, she discovered her Iranian relatives knew nothing about climate change. Shocked, she began sending them science articles she’d translated into Farsi herself. That small family project grew into Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit with 9,000 volunteers in 41 countries who’ve translated climate information into a hundred languages. Kianni, now a student at Stanford, has a goal: that “everyone, everywhere, has access to adequate climate education.”
My team and I got flash flooded out of Petra [Jordan]. We attempted to drive through the rains and waters, but it was too much, and we had to turn back. Petra and the surrounding community in Wadi Musa are experiencing more rainy days and more flash floods as a changing climate impacts regional precipitation. These increasingly common floods shut down the site … and erode its irreplaceable facades. 
Victoria Herrmann
Man in patented shirt with his left hand on his forehead looking in the camera.
As a child, Samuel Ramsey was terrified of bugs, especially bees. Now bees are his mission. The U.S. entomologist aims to stop what he calls “the next pollinator pandemic” by documenting diseases and symbiotic relationships among bees in Asia, the place with the most honeybee diversity. His work has led to awe-filled moments, including one evening in Thailand when he stood beneath a tree with more than 60 Apis dorsata colonies hanging from it, listening to the“mesmerizing hum of giant honeybees.”
Sitting portrait of young man smiling in camera.
When Gab Mejia was 13, he failed to summit Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia’s highest peak, with his father. Yet, Mejia says, he came away with an “unyielding passion for nature.” Now he’s a conservation photographer focusing on the natural world and Indigenous people of the Philippines, his home country. Recently in the mountains of Bukidnon, an Indigenous shaman, or babaylan, baptized Mejia, a ceremony that affirmed the path he’d chosen on that other mountainside long ago.
As night fell, I watched dozens of men free-climb this huge tree with bundles of herbs that they’d lit ablaze. Using only those makeshift smokers, they were able to calm the bees and cut away a small section of the honeycomb … It looked like giant orange fireflies slowly drifting through the trees.
Samuel Ramsey
Man sitting on tall stool.
Spanish photographer and artist Álvaro Laiz strives to connect traditional knowledge and science through art. For his project, The Edge—exploring the story of the early humans who discovered the Americas some 20,000 years ago—he traveled to the place the Chukchi people of Arctic Russia call kromka, where ice, sea, and land meet. While on a hunt with descendants of those early migrants, he says, he learned to observe the stark environment as they did—“to be present and listen.”
Portrait of young blond woman sitting with dreamy smile.
Marine scientist Imogen Napper calls herself a plastic detective. As part of her work investigating pollution, her team discovered microplastics near the summit of Mount Everest, at the highest altitude they'd ever been recorded. She also conducted initial research into microbeads in facial scrubs, which helped influence several countries to ban them. Now the British scientist is using what she learned studying oceans to research the surprising amount of debris floating in Earth’s orbit.
The mama bear charged against us and hit the sled with her enormous paw. The whole situation lasted just a few seconds, but while I was shooting pictures with both of my cameras and holding desperately to the bumping snowmobile, I had an instant in which the polar bear and I made eye contact. I saw the white of her eyes, and then I thought, Damn. We are too close.
Álvaro Laiz
African woman in turban and large round earrings.
Botswanan conservationist Koketso Mookodi takes teachers on what she calls “backyard expeditions,” but her back yard is the Okavango Delta, a massive wetland bursting with wildlife. She aims to inspire this crucial region’s next generation of scientists and conservationists—and for that she needs to recruit the people who educate them. Many teachers are from urban areas, unused to wildlife and the local indigenous culture. “I’ll never tire of their reactions,” she says. “You can see the level of appreciation.”
Young woman holding dog in her arms.
Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a biologist from the Andean highlands of Peru, spends her time in what she calls the “magical” cloud forests, researching and protecting the spectacled Andean bear. On her first ever expedition through the forest to set camera traps, she and her team (including her trained research dog, Ukuku) encountered extreme weather. They had to drink water from tree moss during a severe dry spell and then burn clothing to make a fire during a deluge.
We couldn’t find water [in the cloud forest]; the streams were dry … Desperate, one of the local guides came up with the idea of squeezing the water from the beards of the trees—‘mosses’—and collecting the water from the bromeliads … For four days, we continued advancing with this survival technique until we reached 1,900 meters, where it began to rain nonstop.
Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya
Pari Dukovic is an award-winning photographer working across the genres of portraiture, fashion, and reportage. His story on COVID-19 appeared in the November 2020 magazine.

This story appears in the July 2023 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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