The Explorers
Chris Rainier
Explorer and Photographer
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.
Hans Peter Brøndmo
Entrepreneur and Google X Roboticist
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.
Terry Garcia
Explorer, Storyteller, and Policy Advisor
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. Carolyn Porco
Planetary Scientist and Explorer
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.
Dereck Joubert
Filmmaker and Conservationist
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.