Trailblazing Talks

Sony Ambassador Michael Yamashita has shot for National Geographic for more than 30 years, combining his passions of travel and photography with his love of history and culture.  An Asian Studies major at Wesleyan University and fluent in Japanese, Yamashita has followed his roots to become a Far East expert. In addition to his work throughout Asia, which has included intensive concentrations in China, Japan, Korea and India, his work has taken him to six continents.

Yamashita’s specialty has been in retracing the journeys of iconic explorers, such as Marco Polo and the Chinese admiral Zheng He, along their historic routes to illuminate their discoveries and help us understand the early roots of globalization.  His work has been exhibited in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Germany and closer to home, at The Carter Center, LACMA and the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art. Along with two documentary feature films, Yamashita has published 16 books in multiple languages, including his latest, Shangri-La.

When not speaking or on assignment, Yamashita can be found with his family at his home and photography studio in rural New Jersey, where he is an active volunteer firefighter.

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Dereck and Beverly Joubert are award-winning filmmakers, National Geographic Explorers-at-Large and wildlife conservationists, who have been filming, researching and exploring Africa for over 40 years. Their mission is the conservation and understanding of large predators and other key wildlife species that determine the course of all conservation in Africa. The Jouberts are founders of Rhinos Without Borders, an initiative that has moved 87 rhinos from high poaching areas to safety. They also co-founded the Big Cats Initiative with National Geographic, which currently funds 150 projects in 28 countries. This program has now transitioned to the Great Plains Big Cats Initiative, under the Jouberts’ leadership and Great Plains Foundation management.

The Jouberts have made over 40 films for National Geographic, published 14 books, half a dozen scientific papers, and have written many articles for National Geographic Magazine. Beverly Joubert is also an acclaimed photographer and her international exhibitions have further helped to raise awareness for the plight of big cats across the world.

Their films have received international recognition with major accolades including 8 Emmys, a Peabody, Wildscreen Panda Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Japan Wildlife Film Festival, to name but a few. The Jouberts were also awarded the World Ecology Award alongside Prince Charles and Richard Leakey, and in 2009, they were inducted in the American Academy of Achievement with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

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Keith Ladzinski is a National Geographic photographer and Emmy nominated director.  His work primarily focuses on natural history, climate change and extreme sports. He also creates fine art prints for gallery exhibition and advertising campaigns for select brands and organizations.  His work sends him to the furthest reaches of all seven continents.

Ladzinski is the co-founder of Triage Creative, a founding member of the Sea Legacy Collective, and regularly works with household brands such as Adidas, Apple, Canon, Discovery, Disney, Google, Nike, Oprah, Red Bull, Subaru, The New York Times and Toyota.

Ladzinski is a highly decorated photographer and director who has earned three Telly Awards and two Emmy nominations.  He has also received top honors from Communication Arts, PDN, The International Library of Photography and National Geographic.  He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine and National Geographic.

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Kobie Boykins became an engineer because he wanted to be “that guy who figures out how to design and build things to function at their highest level.”  Well, he’s succeeded. Boykins is a principal mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where he has worked since graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In more than twenty-five years at the lab, he has worked on every Mars mission since the Pathfinder mission, which took the first Rover, “Sojourner,” to Mars in 1996.  Later, Boykins designed the solar arrays that powered the Mars Exploration Rovers, “Spirit” and “Opportunity.” Those Rovers landed in 2004 and were expected to perform for 90 days, but they lived for six years and fourteen years, respectively, sending images and data back to Earth and discovering that the surface of Mars once held water.

Next, Boykins led the mobility and remote sensing teams for Mars Science Laboratory rover, “Curiosity,” designing the actuators that powered the 7-ft. tall rover with a 7-ft arm that operates 10 different tools and 17 cameras, collecting rock, soil and air samples, taking photographs and operating a laser.  Curiosity launched from Cape Canaveral in November, 2011, and landed on Mars in August, 2012. This rover also outlived its predicted life and NASA extended its initial 2-year mission indefinitely.  As of May 2021, it continues to send back images and data.

In 2013, Boykins received a NASA Exceptional Service Medal, one of the highest honors given to NASA employees and contractors. Shortly after, he began his most ambitious project to date, serving as Chief Engineer on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, slated for 2024, which will send a radiation-tolerant spacecraft into a long, looping orbit around Jupiter to perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon. During the nominal mission, the spacecraft will perform 45 flybys of Europa at closest-approach altitudes varying from 1,700 miles to 16 miles above the surface.  The key question they seek to solve is whether the surface ice holds liquid water beneath it.  Where there’s water, there’s the capacity for life. When asked another reason why we need to know this, Boykins says, “From an engineering perspective, we now know Mars had liquid water on the surface, a lot like Earth.  Planetary evolution has caused that water to disappear.  We need to understand how that happened so that we ensure it doesn’t happen here on Earth.”

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Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner is a professional mountaineer out of passion. She lives in Upper Austria and whenever she finds the time, she is out rock climbing, mountaineering in the Alps or on expedition.

Kaltenbrunner trained as a nurse and after a short intermezzo as a sales representative in the outdoor industry, she took the courage and embarked on the unstable career path to become a professional mountaineer. Today, she has all 14 8,000m-peaks under her belt. By reaching the summit of the 8,611m-high K2, she became the first woman to scale all 8,000m-peaks without the use of supplemental oxygen and high altitude porters.

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