Six Superb Award-Winning Photos Showcase Groundbreaking Science
Nature‘s 2025 Scientist at Work photography competition combines incredible photographic skills and fascinating, vital scientific work performed by experts worldwide. This year’s winners deliver a mix of photos featuring Arctic telescopes, mountain fog, tiny frogs, and even whale biologists.
In its sixth year, Nature‘s Scientist at Work competition invites Nature readers to submit their best photos that show the “diverse, interesting, challenging, striking, and colorful work that scientists do around the world.”
What makes this photo contest different from many others is that, while it also features incredible photographs, the entrants are working scientists and students rather than specifically photographers. All six winners featured in this story were selected by a jury of Nature staff.
Of the over 200 entries this year, PhD student Emma Vogel from the University of Tromsø, also known as the Arctic University of Norway, won the top prize for her image of biologist Audun Rikardsen searching for whales near fishing trawlers in the fjords of northern Norway. Rikardsen is seen holding an airgun, which he uses to deploy satellite tags to track and monitor whales in the area.
“You could smell their breath,” says Vogel. “And you could hear them before you can see them, which is always quite incredible.”
The Five Other Winners
Another winning image shows Kate Belleville from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife holding froglets in California’s Lassen National Forest. Ryan Wagner from Washington State University Vancouver captured this award-winning shot. Wagner also had a winning photo in last year’s competition and is the first repeat winner.
These little frogs cannot be tagged like large whales in Norway, so scientists must take a different approach. Scientists inject colored elastomer dyes into the frogs, and together, these form a unique identification code. Belleville is seen here bathing froglets in an anti-fungal solution. The solution is designed to kill chytrid fungus, which is responsible for a significant decline in amphibian species across the globe.
The winning photo below shows the South Pole Telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. It shows Aman Chokshi and his colleague Allen Foster, then a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, braving brutally cold temperatures during an overwintering stay in Antarctica.
Chokshi and Foster were there studying cosmic microwave background radiation from the Universe’s earliest days.
“We had 44 people at the station, I think of those 8 or 10 are scientists who operate the experiments,” says Chokshi. He notes that it’s an odd place to do research. Since there’s no humidity in the air, the scientists there lose their sense of smell temporarily.
“We all go to the botanical gardens on our first day back and just got some greenery and smell some stuff,” Chokshi adds.
Moving to the other side of the globe, freelance research technician Dagmara Wojtanowicz took the image below in Svalbard, Norway. The picture shows geobiologist James Bradley and microbiologist Catherine Larose removing a drilled ice core.
The ethereal shot below shows Michael Lonardi atop Mount Helios in Greece, working on a computer while a balloon floats behind him. Lionel Favre captured this winning shot, and he and Lonardi were researching how clouds form in Europe.
“We had some clouds forming at some point, but really late in the project, and we were so excited,” explains Favre. “So we went before sunrise, to get the clouds. We stayed all day, flying the balloon all the time.”
There’s a theme forming — the next winning shot was also captured at night. Jiayi Wang, the photographer, works with Hao-Cheng Yu, the economic geologist seen here, to develop geological profiles for areas near gold deposits. They aim to make it easier for mining prospectors to, quite literally, strike gold.
“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,” Wang, a PhD student at the China University of Geosciences, explains.
“Geologists often work for years in remote, inaccessible areas, requiring not only mastery of laboratory techniques but also wilderness-survival skills,” Wang adds.
Additional images and information are available in Nature‘s 2025 photo competition article.
Image credits: Photographs provided by Nature. Individual photographers are credited in the captions.
