Christopher Michel

I am pleased to be recognized by Princeton University for the Woodrow Wilson Award. A big year for @Princeton science/engineering alumnae, with Mary Brunkow getting the corresponding graduate award. I wonder if they feel sorry for us...it's not been fun for basic science these days. @caltech @CaltechCCE

Happy to announce the launch of the new 100 Year website we built for the person who coined the term "personal computer' and co-created the first online community: @stewartbrand. It includes his entire ~50,000 photo archive that is now in the Public Domain stewartbrand.org

Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer whose work helped make Apollo and humanity’s first journeys to the Moon possible. The best way to honor her legacy is to finally pick up where her generation left off and never stop going.

Alone on a faraway beach. White water over dark sand, wind off the sea, the horizon lost in fog. Hard not to think of a dear friend who would have found a whole world in these few shades of gray, and made a more beautiful photograph of it.

Sometimes the dream is real. @Sony RX1R III

I prefer photographs that ask more than they answer. @Sony A7R VI

I photographed @KarlDeisseroth and @michelle_monje in Michelle’s office at @Stanford. Between them on the table is her PhD notebook, opened to a page from the period when they were actively collaborating on her doctoral research. It is an artifact in the truest sense. A working record of ideas taking shape. Handwritten equations, sketches, annotations. The physical residue of long hours spent thinking together, testing assumptions, and pushing at the edges of what was known at the time.

Karl is widely known for inventing optogenetics, a breakthrough that made it possible to control specific neurons with light and permanently altered the trajectory of neuroscience and psychiatry. Michelle is a neuro oncologist whose work revealed that neurons do not merely coexist with cancer but can actively drive the growth of brain tumors, especially in children. Her research reshaped how scientists understand the relationship between the nervous system and cancer, opening entirely new therapeutic directions.

What struck me in this moment was how naturally their scientific lives intertwine. The notebook is not just symbolic. It marks a real period of shared intellectual labor, when their collaboration was formative rather than retrospective. Before prizes, before widespread recognition, before entire fields reorganized around their ideas.

This is what scientific partnership looks like at its most honest. Not just co authorship or proximity, but sustained curiosity carried across years. The notebook holds the memory of that time. The photograph holds the present. Together they tell a story about how deep science is often built. Slowly. Carefully. In conversation. And sometimes, with the person you choose to build a life with. @theNASEM #NewHeroes

To be on Mars in the early morning...

Fog drifts through the trees
Salt wind bends the meadow grass
Waves beyond the bluff

“So much mystery now finally seems on the brink of elucidation.”

@KarlDeisseroth, awarded the 2026 @NobelPrize in Medicine. After years of photographing Karl, I’m so happy to see this day.

His story and downloadable portraits: explorers.com/karl-deisserot…

@StanfordMed @Stanford @theNASEM @StanfordEng @theNASciences @theNAMedicine

Where the Cypress Fall. Fallen limbs hold their old twists, pale against the dark earth. There is something tender about this place, the way the forest keeps its dead. #SeaRanch @Sony A7R VI

Thanks to everyone sharing in this moment!
I’m so grateful to my trainees & collaborators…
dlab.stanford.edu/group-members
(pic: optogenetics conference chairs, Tuscany)

Reading for all those asking:

for technical details: dlab.stanford.edu

for everyone: deisseroth.org/projections

“There is a big picture that brings it all into relief and my hope is that we can increase empathy and understanding,” says 2026 medicine laureate Karl Deisseroth.

As a medical student, Deisseroth completed part of his training at a psychiatric clinic. He was struck by the patients’ suffering and their need for help. At the same time, he began to wonder how the brain could function so differently from one person to another.

Deisseroth was awarded this year's medicine prize, together with Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for discoveries leading to optogenetics – a biological technique making it possible to switch the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain on or off.

Optogenetics is now helping us understand more about how nerve cells shape memories, emotions and behaviour in the living brain.

Learn more about the 2026 medicine prize: bit.ly/4ru82ml

The most important briefings of the day.

Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, shares the news of his Nobel Prize with his kids.

This has been a wonderful collaboration with @GoogleDeepMind to make new-to-nature #enzymes. Great work from the whole team.

So proud of Karl!! ♥️. Stanford University professor Karl Deisseroth wins 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/…

As a boy, @RPappalardo hung handmade planets from his bedroom ceiling. Their moons were bits of masking tape pressed onto toothpicks.

Years later at Cornell, Carl Sagan let him sit in on a graduate seminar about ices and oceans in the outer solar system. Europa caught his attention. It would hold it for the next four decades.

Today, Bob is the project scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper, now crossing the solar system toward Jupiter. The spacecraft will investigate an ocean hidden beneath Europa’s fractured ice and ask a question Bob has spent much of his life working toward: Could this world support life?

Read Bob’s story in my New Heroes portrait project:
explorers.com/robert-pappala…

@NASAJPL

Congratulations to #NASmembers Karl Deisseroth and Peter Hegemann on receiving the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine! They are honored alongside Georg Nagel for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.

Left photo by @chrismichel

Congratulations, @KarlDeisseroth! Photographed for @theNASEM

.@KarlDeisseroth listens to patients living with severe depression and asks what in the brain could account for their suffering.

His work in optogenetics gave scientists a way to control nerve cells with light, opening new possibilities for understanding the minds he treats.

A remarkable writer and a devoted physician. Today, a @NobelPrize laureate.

Congratulations, Karl.

Photographed for New Heroes. Portrait and story: explorers.com/karl-deisserot…

@theNASEM @StanfordMed @Stanford @theNASciences