The Future of Exploration

Dr. Ballard is a world-renowned ocean explorer best known for his historic discoveries of hydrothermal vents, the ill-fated RMS Titanic, the German battleship Bismarck.

Sir Richard is founder of the Virgin Group, one of the world’s most irresistible brands, which has expanded into many diverse sec- tors, including travel, telecommunications, health, banking, music, and leisure.

Jimmy Chin is a professional mountain athlete, National Geographic photographer, Academy Award–winning film director, and New York Times best-selling author.

An explorer who has traversed some of the world’s toughest environments, David de Rothschild has been harnessing his curious spirit to help give Nature a voice and make the world a more sustainable place.

Dr. Fox is the son of a Native Hawaiian mother and the grandson of Holocaust survivors. His family history guides his practice as a genome scientist and advocate for technologies that empower Indigenous communities.

Dr. Zahass is a world-famous Egyptologist and former Egyptian Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs.

CEO of WildlifeDirect, Dr. Kahumbu has a PhD from Princeton and is an ecologist committed to transforming conservation results in Africa and the world through science, advocacy, and education.

Chairman of the board of Lindblad Expeditions, Sven Lindblad was born in Switzerland, son of renowned expedition travel pioneer Lars- Eric Lindblad.

Nemonte Nenquimo is an Indigenous Waorani leader committed to defending her ancestral territory and her people’s survival in the Amazon rainforest.

Dr. Parcak is an archaeologist and Egyptologist who has worked on excavations in fourteen countries across the globe since 1999.

Chris Rainier is a documentary photographer and filmmaker and a National Geographic Explorer. In the early 1980s, Chris was Ansel Adams’ last photographic assistant and helped Adams with the use of his photography to help conserve many of the American National Parks.

Paul Salopek is a veteran foreign correspondent and the founder of the Out of Eden Walk project, a multi-year journey on foot from the place of humankind’s origins in Africa to South America.

President and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, Kris Tompkins is an American conservationist and the former CEO of Patagonia, Inc.

A deep-sea explorer who is passionate about developing new ways to better understand the ocean and make it more accessible to everyone around the world, Dr. Croff Bell is a National Geographic Explorer and the founder and president of the Ocean Discovery League.

An entrepreneur with thirty years of experience starting technology companies, Hans Peter Brøndmo now leads Everyday Robots at Google, a science fiction–sounding technology moonshot that aims to build robots that can be as helpful to people in the real world as computers are in the virtual world.

Yvon Chouinard is driven by a curiosity for adventure and making improvements; both have made him a passionate activist and iconoclastic businessman.

Called “Her Deepness” by The New Yorker and New York Times, Dr. Earle is a National Geographic Explorer at Large and founder and co-chair of Mission Blue.

Terry Garcia was the Executive Vice President and Chief Science and Exploration Officer for the National Geographic Society for seventeen years and was responsible 
for the Society’s core mission programs, including those that supported and managed more than 300 scientific field research, conservation, and exploration projects annually.

Dr. Hoffman is a professor in MIT’s Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. As a NASA astronaut, he made five spaceflights, becoming the first astronaut to log one thousand hours of flight time aboard the space shuttle.

Chief conservation scientist and director at the Centre for Wildlife Studies in Bangalore, India, Dr. Karanth is adjunct faculty at Duke University.

Dr. Longstaff is an adjunct professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of New South Wales, and a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of New South Wales, and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.

Dr. Nijman is Emeritus professor of geography at the University of Amsterdam and distinguished university professor of urban studies and geosciences at Georgia State University.

Dr. Porco is a planetary scientist and explorer. She was the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, and an imaging scientist on the celebrated Voyager mission to the outer solar system in the 1980s.

Founder and director of the Ramsey Research Foundation, Dr. Ramsey graduated with a BS in entomology from Cornell University in 2011 and focused his research on predatory and parasitic insect behavior.

Dr. Sereno studied art and biology at Northern Illinois University and earned a doctorate from Columbia University studying dinosaur fossils in far-flung collections in Asia.

Erik Weihenmayer is one of the most celebrated and accomplished athletes in the world. In 2001, he became the only blind person in history to climb Mount Everest.

An award-winning researcher, explorer, author, and speaker, Dr. Berger was the recipient of the Academy of Science of South Africa Science-for- Society Gold Medal and was the 2016 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year.

Dan Buettner is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, and New York Times best-selling author.

Dr. Davis is a writer, photographer and filmmaker whose work has taken him to the Amazon, Tibet, Africa, Australia, Polynesia, and the Arctic.

Dr. Fisher is an archaeologist, a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University and the founder of the Earth Archive, which is focused on building a three-dimensional record of the entire planet.

Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) and UN Messenger of Peace, Dr. Goodall is a world-renowned ethologist and activist inspiring greater understanding and action on behalf of the natural world.

Dereck Joubert and his wife, Beverly, are world- famous filmmakers, conservationists, and explorers from Botswana. As National Geographic Explorers at Large, they founded the Big Cats Initiative, which now has over 150 projects across twenty-nine countries focused on protecting large cats.

A third-generation Kenyan paleoanthropologist, Dr. Leakey continues the legacy of the famed Leakey family in the search for human origins in Kenya’s fossil-rich Turkana Basin.

Wasfia Nazreen is the only Bangladeshi, and the first Bengali, to climb K2 and the Seven Summits, the highest mountains of every continent.

Dr. Ntaiya founded the inter- national nonprofit Kakenya’s Dream to educate girls and end harmful traditional practices, including FGM and child marriage.

Travis Price is an architect, author, professor and philosopher with four decades of groundbreaking design to his name.

Dr. Sala is a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life and quit academia in 2008 to become a full-time conservationist as a National Geographic Explorer in Residence.

Nainoa Thomson is an explorer, master navigator, cultural revivalist, educator, and storyteller who has led the revival of the ancient Polynesian art of navigation.