2015 Presentation: National Geographic Young Explorers

Anthropologists, geologists, entomologists, marine biologists, adventurers, change makers and storytellers. National Geographic has helped launch the careers of many of today’s most accomplished explorers with its Young Explorers grants. The program helps cover field costs for passionate, creative and innovative young individuals who have great ideas about how to make the world a better place.

Cara Eckholm
Cara Eckholm is a Princeton graduate and accomplished debater who has sparred in world champion events in the Philippines and at Oxford. Eckholm, who wrote her senior thesis on the effect of monuments on reconstructing national identity in post-Communist Eastern Europe, is studying the post-war rebuilding of Sarajevo in Bosnia, along with fellow explorer photojournalist Amanda Rivkin. Together, they’re pursuing the story of the new urban landscape in a city still ravaged by the legacy of conflict.

Julia Harte
Julia Harte is an investigative journalist and M.S. graduate of Columbia Journalism School, working at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. For three years, she was a freelance reporter based in Turkey, where she covered politics, international relations, human rights, energy policy, and environmental issues. She was awarded a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant in 2013 to undertake a reporting trip along the Tigris River.

Hannah Reyes
Photographer Hannah Reyes grew up in the Philippines and has been led to extraordinary places across the globe — Manila, Cambodia, Mindanao — by her passion for telling thought-provoking stories through images. She is currently examining the evolving landscape of indigenous cultures in the Philippines, which are undergoing major shifts as improving road access, education and media open up channels of communication and travel like never before. Reyes’ project follows three indigenous communities in the northern part of the country, looking at old traditions that are surviving and asking what new norms are emerging through the infusion of modernity.

Eddie Roqueta
Filmmaker and wildlife ecologist Eddie Roqueta is a grad student in Montana State University’s MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking Program. For his thesis, Roqueta is creating a documentary that chronicles sun bear conservation in Borneo, where global demand for palm oil has replaced hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat with plantations, creating a critical situation for the smallest, most arboreal and least known of the bear species.