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History & Culture

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.

“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.

Published June 6, 2023

5 min read

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Left: 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.

Right: 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.”

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Left: 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.”

Right: 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.

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Left: 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.”

Right: 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.

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Left: 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.”

Right: 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.

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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