HHMI Bulletin / Winter 2015 5

To see more of McConnell’s photos, go to www.hhmi.org/bulletin/winter-2015.

“animal-obsessed kid,” she says, the kind who kept hamsters and rabbits and parakeets, who spent days watching a colony of wood rats beside her family’s Pennsylvania home. She idolized Jane Goodall and dreamed of someday following the great primatologist’s footsteps into an African jungle. Second As an undergraduate in Yet she doesn’t consider in the late 1970s, however, taking pictures to be an escape from Calling McConnell found behavioral the laboratory. Rather, she says, it happened nearly a studies unsatisfying. Sure, she conservation photography and decade ago, but Susan McConnell could describe a monkey yawning neurobiology are two trunks that remembers the moment with or courting a mate—but what was family staring down a marabou have grown from the same root. telephoto clarity: she was standing happening in its brain to produce stork or about rescuing Both can be traced back to on the deck of a ship in the the behavior? a baby stuck in an abandoned the experiences of that animal- Svalbard archipelago, halfway So began a neurobiology water trough, as well as about the loving girl, and McConnell, who between mainland and the career devoted to understanding larger themes of conservation. this year received funding as North Pole, watching a polar bear the dynamics of in the On a planet where so many an HHMI professor to help life leap from one ice foe to another. . McConnell’s creatures are imperiled by the science students communicate She pressed her camera focus shifted from wild animals rapacity of a certain bipedal research through art, wants to to her eye, trying to anticipate to laboratory animals, where it primate, McConnell’s new pass that love along. each jump. Her biceps ached. would remain for two decades. mission is to produce “powerful At Stanford, she teaches Her fingers were so numb she Then came the trip to Svalbard. images that connect us with our conservation photography to could no longer feel the shutter Wildlife photography turned natural heritage and stimulate undergraduates, helping them button. “I was cold to the core,” into a second vocation, and a commitment to conservation,” learn to tell stories with a purpose. says McConnell, a neuroscientist McConnell quickly graduated she says. Her work has been “Just as much as I’m excited by at , “and from capturing pretty pictures published in Smithsonian and my own pictures,” says McConnell, I realized that I’d never been to telling stories with her National Geographic magazines “I’m excited by the photographs happier in my life.” photographs: about a meerkat and displayed in galleries. my students take.” —Brandon Keim Though McConnell had traveled to Svalbard seeking just such a sight, she wasn’t an especially serious photographer. In fact, she was ambivalent about photography. Looking through a lens, worried McConnell, would disconnect her from the moment. Instead, the opposite proved true. The challenge of composing a shot deepened McConnell’s experience, making her aware of each subtle shift in the bear’s posture, each change in light and mood. She returned from Svalbard with the fires of a new passion stoked. Her passion for wildlife, McConnell though, had been there from

Susan the start. McConnell was an