Mark W. Moffett: E. O. Wilson Protégé, National Geographic Photographer, Ecologist

Before graduating from Harvard University with a Ph.D. (1987) under the mentorship of famed entomologist Edward O. Wilson, Mark Moffett was a high school dropout. During his Harvard years, he flourished and began to build a career that blends research in ecology, entomology, and anthropology as well as exploration, photography, and storytelling. His curiosity began in his backyard in Salida, Colorado, where he watched ants as a toddler. That early obsession with insects led him years later to examine how social systems emerge in ants and, eventually, humans. Moffett's family were not academics. His mother was a stay-at-home mom, and his father was a Presbyterian minister. A shy, nature-obsessed child, he spent hours exploring creeks, climbing trees, breeding reptiles, and watching ants. Although he never graduated from high school, Moffett was accepted and encouraged by the friendships he had made with scientists at Beloit College, where he found academic refuge. Early in his undergraduate career, Moffett joined an expedition to Costa Rica—his first trip outside the U.S.—where he was noted as an expert snake catcher. He caught the attention of seasoned scientists and joined further expeditions studying Mechanitis butterflies, Coleoptera, and lizards across Central and South America, where he cultivated a taste for exploration. On one six-month expedition across the Andes, he discovered a new species of Notiobia beetle (Carabidae) at 12,000 feet in Peru. It would become the first of several animals named after him, from a frog he found a quarter-mile deep in a Venezuelan sinkhole to an ant in French Guiana. He graduated from Beloit with a B.A. (1979), magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and five scientific publications.