Some people shape their field. Joanne Chory willed an entire revolution into being. A towering figure in plant biology, she spent decades unraveling the genetic codes that allow plants to sense and respond to their environment, work that has reshaped how we think about climate resilience and agriculture in a warming world. But more than her research, it was her sheer force of will that defined her.

By the time I photographed her in 2022, Parkinson’s had already taken its toll. Her movements were slower, her body less cooperative. But none of that diminished her presence. She was still the same fierce, incisive mind that had spent her career pushing boundaries. She insisted on leading the session, showing me around the Salk Institute, her office, and her study, moving with determination, her disease ever-present but never in command.

I had just been photographing Nobel laureate Ardem Patapoutian before our session, and I’d confided in him my concern about how to portray Joanne in my New Heroes series. Should I try to downplay the Parkinson’s? His advice was simple but profound: Include it. So I did. The resulting portraits capture her in motion against a still background, a visual metaphor for her relentless energy, her refusal to be defined by limitations.

Chory’s scientific contributions were vast. She decoded the genetic mechanisms behind how plants perceive and adapt to light, paving the way for crops that could grow with less water, thrive in harsher conditions, and help mitigate climate change. At the Salk Institute, she spearheaded the Harnessing Plants Initiative, a visionary effort to develop plants that could pull more carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their roots, leveraging nature itself as a weapon against global warming. In a world desperate for solutions, her work pointed to one hiding in plain sight: the plants beneath our feet.

Even as her body failed her, her mind remained as sharp as ever. She continued leading her lab, publishing research, and mentoring young scientists until the very end. She worked through sheer determination, outpacing even her own disease.

Two years after that session, she was gone. But the impact of her work, on science, on agriculture, on the fight against climate change, remains. So does the image of her, striding through the Salk Institute, still leading, still pushing forward.

Joanne Chory was more than a scientist. She was a force of nature.