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I've spent much of my life around people doing difficult, consequential work: aviators on…
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Christopher Michel shared thisMore Life to Live: Multiple sclerosis can make a person’s future impossible to plan. An attack may affect vision or movement, then recede, leaving uncertainty about what will happen next. Dr. Stephen Hauser spent decades pursuing a treatment that could change that course, following evidence that pointed toward an overlooked part of the immune system. In MS, the immune system attacks tissue in the brain and spinal cord, damaging myelin, the protective insulation around nerve fibers, and sometimes the fibers themselves. Messages no longer travel reliably. The consequences depend on where the damage occurs. For years, research concentrated on immune cells called T cells. Stephen’s work helped establish that B cells also played a crucial role. These cells are best known for producing antibodies, but they also communicate with other immune cells and help direct inflammation. Evidence from laboratory models and human tissue suggested that leaving them out of the explanation meant missing something essential. Testing that idea in patients was difficult. A proposal to study a drug that depleted B cells was initially denied government funding. Stephen and his collaborators persisted. In a trial published in 2008, rituximab sharply reduced inflammatory lesions visible on brain scans and reduced relapses in people with relapsing MS. Targeting B cells had produced a clinical result that could no longer be dismissed. The work helped establish a new approach to treatment. In 2017, the FDA approved ocrelizumab for relapsing forms of MS and for primary progressive MS, in which disability generally accumulates without distinct attacks. It was the first approved treatment for that progressive form. These medicines do not cure MS or reliably repair damage already sustained. They can suppress inflammatory disease activity and slow worsening disability. For a person trying to continue working, raise children, or make plans beyond the next appointment, that difference can be enormous. Stephen tells the longer story in his memoir, The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries. The book follows the patients and setbacks behind the research, allowing room for uncertainty that a published result rarely conveys. A successful trial arrives with a date and a conclusion. The years spent reaching it are harder to see. During our visit, he spoke about patients he had known decades earlier. They remained individuals in his memory, with lives that had shaped the questions he pursued. His kindness was evident in the attention he gave our conversation and the credit he gave others. University of California, San Francisco The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
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Christopher Michel shared thisStanford's Abraham Verghese had given his living room over to writing. When I photographed him at home in Palo Alto in 2023, daylight filled the bay window. Books crowded his desk, two wooden mannequins sat on the shelves, and a whiteboard behind him held story ideas. The Covenant of Water had just been published. I loved seeing the room where he worked. We talked about medicine and literature. Abraham has spent decades reminding doctors how easily the person in a hospital bed can disappear behind the information gathered about them. Someone still has to examine the patient, ask where it hurts, and give them time to answer. His books offer that same attention. In My Own Country, he writes about caring for people with AIDS in Tennessee before effective treatments were available. In his novels, illness enters lives already full of family, ambition, and love. A diagnosis explains only part of what happens next. I made this portrait for New Heroes. Spending that afternoon with Abraham gave me another reason to return to his books. Read “Beyond the Diagnosis” on Explorers: https://lnkd.in/gnD_SG95 The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Stanford University
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Christopher Michel shared thisIn Michelle Monje's laboratory at Stanford, she showed me cancer cells taken from a young patient who had recently died. The cells were still alive and dividing. Michelle is a neurologist and neuroscientist studying some of the most aggressive childhood brain cancers. Her research has revealed that these tumors can form working connections with neurons, receiving signals that help them grow. She is searching for ways to interrupt that communication and develop treatments for children whose options remain painfully limited. When I photographed her in December 2025, notes from parents lined her office walls. Children’s drawings sat beside papers and books. There were small dragonflies, birds, and butterflies. She told me that some bereaved parents come to see these creatures as signs of their children, a feeling that they are still nearby. Some families visit the laboratory to be near their children’s cells. Michelle spoke about those visits with deep feeling. By the end of our time together, both of us were in tears. The dragonflies had come from families whose children she could not save, and who still trusted her to keep trying. My portrait and story of Michelle, “Dragonflies”: https://lnkd.in/gyBcYSZ2 Stanford University School of Medicine The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
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Christopher Michel shared thisA bacterial defense against viruses became a way to edit human DNA. Jennifer Doudna helped make that leap. Then she helped lead the difficult conversation about what we should do with it. I first photographed Jennifer in Berkeley in 2021. Summer fog hung over the hills, and the pandemic had emptied the institute’s hallways. Her work with Emmanuelle Charpentier had already earned them the Nobel Prize. Two years later, the FDA approved the first CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease. Our next portrait session was at her home, with her husband, biochemist Jamie Cate. She was relaxed and quick to smile. We returned to the consequences of her work: the possibility of relieving suffering, and the responsibility of making changes that could reach beyond a single life. A photograph from that afternoon became her Nobel portrait. More: https://lnkd.in/gfzpDv9K The Nobel Prize The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine University of California, Berkeley
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Christopher Michel shared thisWhen Paula Hammond arrived at MIT as an undergraduate from Detroit, she wondered if she belonged. In January 2026, she became dean of its School of Engineering, the first woman to hold that position. I photographed Paula at MIT in October 2023, when she was leading the Chemical Engineering department. She was warm and easy to talk with. What stayed with me was how she spoke about her students and colleagues. She remembered the encouragement that had helped her find her footing, and cared deeply about giving others that same chance. Her research takes on a stubborn problem in cancer treatment. Finding a medicine that kills a cancer cell is only the beginning. Getting it safely through the body and inside that cell is another matter. Paula and her collaborators build tiny particles, adding layers far thinner than a human cell. Those layers can protect a medicine, help it attach to particular cells, and control its release. Some experimental designs pair chemotherapy with RNA that reduces a cancer cell’s ability to resist treatment. Years of work can turn on a small change in a particle’s surface. I admire that patience, and the human purpose behind it. Somewhere beyond the experiments is a person waiting for a treatment that works. Now Paula leads the engineering school where she once questioned her place. I think about the students arriving there today, and what it might mean for them to know her story. My portrait and fuller account of Paula’s work are part of New Heroes on Explorers.com: https://lnkd.in/ek_gFQ5D Massachusetts Institute of Technology The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine National Academy of Medicine National Academy of Sciences
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Christopher Michel shared thisRobert Sapolsky lives not far from my home in San Francisco. When I photographed him in September 2023, he insisted we work outside. He told me he had seen what long COVID could do to brains. I trusted him. He brought primate skulls. We talked about what happens before we make a decision, and how far back you have to go to understand it. Robert spent years studying wild baboons in Kenya, examining how social relationships affect stress and health. In Behave and Determined, he brings that attention to human behavior. Follow the causes of an action through our biology and experience, he argues, and eventually you reach a history none of us chose. His conclusion that free will does not exist is contested. But the questions he raises deserve our attention. How much credit can we take for circumstances we inherited? What does punishment accomplish? How might we treat people differently if we understood more about what shaped them? The conversation kept returning to how much of a person’s life takes shape before they have any say in it. Read the full portrait of Robert Sapolsky in New Heroes: https://lnkd.in/g7kfjmJR
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Christopher Michel shared thisAlien Earths: When I photographed Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell in November 2025, we met in her corner office on the upper floor of the Space Sciences Building. Walking through the door stopped me in my tracks. Planetary globes and brass orreries sat on the tables and shelves, and photographs of Carl Sagan looked out from the walls. For decades, this had been his office. Stepping into it felt like walking into a shrine to scientific wonder. Before I raised my camera, I wanted time to take it all in, imagining him at work in that light, dreaming of worlds no telescope could yet see. More: https://lnkd.in/gHDcD_As
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Christopher Michel reposted thisChristopher Michel reposted this“Your purpose as a scientist is not to achieve fame or money, that is not your purpose, those might be side effects and good for you, that could be wonderful for you but it is a side effect, it is not the main goal. The main goal is to make discoveries and gift them to humanity. And those discoveries and that knowledge stays with humanity long after you are gone.” – Carolyn Bertozzi on the scientist's purpose Bertozzi was awarded the 2022 chemistry prize for utilising click chemistry in living organisms. She developed bioorthogonal reactions which take place inside living organisms without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell. #NobelPrize Photo: Christopher Michel
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Christopher Michel shared thisBefore the rocket, there was this goodbye. I made this photograph at Baikonur on May 28, 2014. Reid Wiseman and his girls, hands raised on opposite sides of the glass. He was about to leave Earth for the first time. I think about the photograph whenever I hear his name. All the years of preparation, the machinery of spaceflight, the enormous distances ahead. And here, a father saying goodbye to his daughters. Since that day, Reid has lived aboard the International Space Station and commanded Artemis II around the Moon. Now he’s been named deputy director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He joins a place that has changed our understanding of the universe, landing rovers on Mars and sending spacecraft beyond the planets. Work that takes years of your life before you learn if you got it right. Reid knows something about the commitment that asks of people, and of the families beside them. Congratulations, Reid. Twelve years ago, I stood with my camera on the other side of that glass. I could not have imagined all that lay ahead. My portrait and essay for the The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: https://lnkd.in/gyezGD6q NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Caltech
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Christopher Michel liked thisChristopher Michel liked thisI've been thinking a lot recently about what writing means in the age of AI. This week I'm been reading "The King of Elfland's Daughter" by Lord Dunsany, and the following passage from the opening of Chapter 16 seems especially relevant. Dunsany wrote this over 100 years ago (published in 1924), and his words do, indeed, still reach us unchanged "over the rolling centuries." "And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man's thoughts for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills."
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Christopher Michel liked thisChristopher Michel liked thisAfter a decade as a Hobokenite, climbing the hill to Stevens Institute of Technology this morning felt a little different. 😊 What better way to start an AI conference than walking into a conversation about Machine Learning and Optimization… only to discover that some of my academic PhD ancestry was in the room! A wonderful reminder of how small, connected, and full of stories the Operations Research community really is. And what a day of conversations! 🚀 An inspiring opening from Mack MacKenzie on their enterprise AI journey. 🧠 A fascinating masterclass in Decision Intelligence from Horia Tipi. 💡 And a fun discovery from Alkiviadis Vazacopoulos: FICO the optimization company is behind the FICO Score! Who knew that a conversation about optimization could bring us into Credit Scores? Optimization really does have a way of finding itself in every corner of the business world. And increasingly, AI is bringing it closer to the decisions that matter. A big thank you to John Baker MS, LAT, ATC , Eduardo De La Calle, and Emily Stuis for sharing such interesting experiences and perspectives, and to Jesse Lisnow, George Calhoun, and Steve Yang for the kind invitation! Denise Rotatori you were missed!! I walked back down the hill feeling energized, inspired, and even more excited about what's ahead at the intersection of AI, Business, and Optimization. One question I keep coming back to: As AI becomes increasingly capable of reasoning and acting, will optimization become the missing link between intelligence and real business value? #LifeAtBNY #AI #DecisionIntelligence #Optimization #CRAFT #StevensInstituteOfTechnology
Experience & Education
Publications
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Photographs
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My photographs have been published widely in international print and digital outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, BBC, Scientific American, Outside Magazine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, NBC News, Agence France-Presse, Smithsonian Magazine, Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, among others.
Much of my work comes from extreme and rarely seen environments, including the South Pole, Mount Everest, the Korean DMZ, Papua…My photographs have been published widely in international print and digital outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, BBC, Scientific American, Outside Magazine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, NBC News, Agence France-Presse, Smithsonian Magazine, Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, among others.
Much of my work comes from extreme and rarely seen environments, including the South Pole, Mount Everest, the Korean DMZ, Papua New Guinea, and the edge of space aboard a U-2 spy plane. I have also photographed scientists, engineers, astronauts, and global leaders, including His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
I have self-published several fine art books, including Monochromatic, Rajasthan, Point 95, and Roof of the World. I am currently working on POLAR, a long-form photography book created in collaboration with Pico Iyer, exploring polar regions through images and essays.
I am also the editor of Explorers.com and a member of the Explorers Club. A broader archive of my work can be found at ChristopherMichel.com. -
The Military Advantage
Simon & Schuster
Projects
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New Heroes
A long-term portrait and storytelling project documenting the scientists, engineers, and medical innovators shaping our understanding of the world.
Christopher Michel created New Heroes to humanize the people behind major advances in science and technology. The project combines large-format portraiture with narrative profiles, offering an intimate view of individuals whose work often remains abstract or unseen.
To date, the project includes 300 of the world’s most inspiring…A long-term portrait and storytelling project documenting the scientists, engineers, and medical innovators shaping our understanding of the world.
Christopher Michel created New Heroes to humanize the people behind major advances in science and technology. The project combines large-format portraiture with narrative profiles, offering an intimate view of individuals whose work often remains abstract or unseen.
To date, the project includes 300 of the world’s most inspiring scientists, from Nobel laureates to pioneering researchers and emerging voices across disciplines, photographed in their own environments with a focus on presence, character, and lived experience.
Photographs and stories from New Heroes have been shared widely across digital and print platforms, reaching millions of viewers.
New Heroes is part of Michel’s ongoing work as Artist-in-Residence at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Honors & Awards
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Henry Crown Fellow
Aspen Institute
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Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters
Tiffin University
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