Six striking images showcase scientific fieldwork

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The winners of Nature’s 2025 #ScientistAtWork photo competition are drawn entirely from fieldwork entries, taking viewers on a voyage of scientific discovery that includes the Arctic and Antarctic circles, both sides of the Pacific Ocean, and a shot from atop a Greek mountain. Nature’s careers team received more than 200 entries from researchers around the world. Both the overall winner and two of the other five winning entrants were PhD students at the time they took their photographs. All were selected by a jury of Nature staff, including five of the journal’s media and art editors. Each winner receives a prize of £500 (US$670), as well as a year’s subscription to Nature in print and online.

If you’d like to take part in next year’s competition, you can keep updated by signing up to Nature’s free weekly careers briefing newsletter.

Winner

Gulls scream overhead as a scientist battles raging waves from a boat in a northern Norwegian fjord, with his course aided only by the yellow glow of a nearby fishing trawler. This dawn shot of biologist Audun Rikardsen, taken by his PhD student Emma Vogel in November 2020, is this year’s overall Scientist at Work photo competition winner.

Vogel is an animal movement researcher and spatial ecologist who completed her PhD at the University of Tromsø — The Arctic University of Norway — in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Rikardsen there as a postdoctoral researcher. For her, this photograph represents a rare peaceful moment in an otherwise chaotic morning.

“It feels quite calm,” she says of the photo. “I’m used to so much going on during fieldwork. It seems very thoughtful, and breathing, and just taking a moment.”

Their fieldwork involved tailing fishing vessels in the fjords of northern Norway, where there is an abundance of herring. These fish attract large numbers of killer whales (Orcinus orca) and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Vogel and Rikardsen track the movements of whales with satellite tags, which are deployed using the wide-barrelled air gun Rikardsen is holding in the photo.

These tags collect data on whale location and surfacing patterns; some also collect diving behaviour, including dive duration and maximum depth. Often the researchers also conduct a biopsy, extracting tissue samples that can be used to monitor whale health.

This activity keeps the scientists close to their targets. “You could smell their breath,” says Vogel. “And you could hear them before you can see them, which is always quite incredible.”

Careful scrutiny of Vogel’s photo reveals a killer whale surfacing in the background of the image, framed by the metal rail behind Rikardsen — something that had eluded the judges when they first checked the submission. “I was happy to get that,” says Vogel. “I mean, it’s such a spectacular place to do fieldwork.”

All photos by Emma Vogel

Here are the rest of the winning images from the competition.

A fistful of frogs

This is Ryan Wagner’s second winning Scientist at Work image (his entry was also chosen last year), a first for the competition. This time, Wagner, a PhD student at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV), photographed Kate Belleville in the lush surrounds of northern California’s Lassen National Forest. Wagner and Belleville, who is an environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in Redding, alongside other biologists and volunteers, trekked for hours to capture and bathe a group of froglets in an antifungal solution designed to kill chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), which is responsible for the decline of amphibian species worldwide. The image, taken in September last year, records the tagged and bathed creatures being released into the wild.

The frogs’ size means they cannot be tagged like Vogel’s whales; instead, the biologists at WSUV inject the frogs with a series of coloured elastomer dyes, which together constitute a unique identification code. These dyes glow under an ultraviolet light.

They’re small animals, and easy to miss. “If you weren’t looking for frogs, you might think that it’s a cricket hopping out of your way,” says Wagner. “But they’re tiny little frogs. And so, we catch them carefully.”

Ryan Wagner

Drilling in the polar night

In the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard, Dagmara Wojtanowicz — a freelance research technician — took this photo of an ice core being drilled by geobiologist James Bradley and microbiologist Catherine Larose. Wojtanowicz, who has lived in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, for eight years, mostly works for the Norwegian Polar Institute — which is based in Tromsø — but has also been involved in other projects.

Bradley is based at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in Marseille, France, and Larose is at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France.

The photo was taken during the daytime in December 2020; in Svalbard, the sun stays at least 6 ° beneath the horizon between mid-November and late January, says Wojtanowicz. The ice cores being drilled in the photo were part of a project conducted by Bradley and Larose to investigate how microbes and other life forms in the ice survive and adapt to the dark and cold of the polar night.

Dagmara Wojtanowicz

Fog chaser

For Lionel Favre and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), hauling a balloon to the cloudy summit of a mountain is all in a day’s work. Their research atop Mount Helmos in Greece forms part of a pan-European initiative. CleanCloud, funded by Horizon Europe — the European Union’s research and innovation funding programme — aims to better understand cloud formation across the continent.

It’s the end of a long field campaign — Favre and his colleagues had to wait for almost a month in disappointingly clement weather, until clouds finally started forming. When they noticed the right conditions, they hurried to the measurement site on Helmos and set up their equipment. The centrepiece is their tethered weather balloon, which provides flight to a box of scientific instruments just below it. These collect data at various elevation points.

“We had some clouds forming at some point, but really late in the project, and we were so excited,” says Favre. “So we went before sunrise, to get the clouds. We stayed all day, flying the balloon all the time.”

Immediately after taking this image at the end of their 15-hour stint, Favre, who is a technician, and his postdoc colleague Michael Lonardi, whose main research focus is aerosol-cloud interactions in polar regions, packed up their equipment and headed back down the mountain.

Lionel Favre

Going for gold

At the end of a long day conducting fieldwork in eastern Siberia, Hao-Cheng Yu, an economic geologist at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing; CUGB), returns to his cabin. Jiayi Wang, who took the photo, works with Yu to develop geological profiles for areas that are located near to gold deposits, to aid mining prospectors.

“What makes this mining area particularly interesting is that some deposits here contain not only gold but also significant amounts of copper, while others are rich in tungsten,” says Wang, a PhD student at the CUGB.

“Geologists often work for years in remote, inaccessible areas, requiring not only mastery of laboratory techniques but also wilderness-survival skills,” says Wang.

Occasionally, the sky is this clear on the eastern coast of Siberia, where fault lines and geology have conspired to forge pockets of gold. It’s also cold; Yu is lit by a roaring fire in the cabin. The tip of the fire is reaching up to the sky through a chimney just behind the doorway.

Wang describes the sense of tedium felt by some of the visiting researchers in such an isolated location. “There’s no network there. And the only thing you can do is watch the rocks. But for the local people, they go fishing and enjoy that kind of life.”

Jiayi Wang

An Antarctic miracle

This image of the vast South Pole Telescope (SPT), situated at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole station, was taken six months into Aman Chokshi’s 14-month stay at the US-run Antarctic research station.

It’s too cold to be out in the open for long. But every day Chokshi and his colleague Allen Foster, then a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the other ‘winterover’ scientist at the station who was focused on the SPT, made the one-kilometre walk, braving temperatures of between −50 °C and −70 °C, to clear the dish of snow. Every few weeks, they’d also grease the SPT’s gears to enable it to continue measuring cosmic microwave background radiation from the early Universe.

Chokshi is now a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, but was a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, Australia, when he stayed at the station.

It’s a strange place to be. “We had 44 people at the station, I think of those 8 or 10 are scientists who operate the experiments,” says Chokshi. Because of the close to 0% humidity in the air, there’s a loss of smell.

The researchers have developed a tradition to mark their arrival in New Zealand after a stint at the station: “We all go to the botanical gardens on our first day back and just get some greenery and smell some stuff,” says Chokshi.

Aman Chokshi

Nature 641, 805-808 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01398-0