The Scientist at Work photo competition, hosted by scientific journal Nature, is an annual contest that encourages scientists across all disciplines to share images to celebrate and showcase the “interesting, challenging, striking and colorful” projects that scientists undertake around the world.
Now in its seventh year, the 2026 competition saw five winning images – with Gunnar Hartmann, an undergraduate student in BioGeoSciences at the University of Koblenz in Germany, taking the overall crown.
Hartmann’s winning shot (top image) captured a pair of paragliding researchers guiding a flock of migrating northern bald ibises above the fields and olive groves of Jaén, southern Spain.
Hartmann photographed the scene while working with the Waldrappteam, an Austrian conservation and research group supporting the reintroduction of the ibises into Europe.
These birds once populated the lower reaches of the northern Alps, but human hunting and climate change drove them to extinction in central Europe.
In the image, we see two Waldrappteam scientists guiding the ibises on their northbound route by singing a rhythmic German tune.
Other above-land winning shots came from PhD students Haolun ‘Allen’ Tian and Shayanta Chowdhury. Tian, studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, used a drone to snap his colleague in a small boat passing through a toxic-looking layer of algae to collect water samples from Dog Lake, Ontario.
Chowdhury, gunning for his doctorate at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, captured an entomologist analyzing a yellow fever mosquito under a vibrant ultraviolet light. While Chowdhury is a chemistry student, the scientist in the frame is studying how the drug nitisinone can be used to kill blood-feeding insects.
Two underwater shots also made the winning cut. Marine ecologist Robert Harcourt captured marine biologist Michael Doane carefully collecting a skin sample from a whale shark at Ningaloo Reef, off the coast of western Australia.
And marine biologist Uli Kunz from Germany photographed two divers in the Saudi Arabaian Red Sea installing an incubation chamber over part of a coral reef, a vital underwater ecosystem in the region.
All scientists making no more than 25% of their income from photography can enter the Scientist at Work competition, with the winners judged by a panel of Nature staff.
The winning images are featured in a Nature issue in print and online, receive a year’s personal print and online subscription to the publication, and £500 or equivalent in a different currency (approximately $670 / AU$950).
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