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We are proud to announce the 2025 line-up of PONANT voyages featuring Explorers Club members. Explore 12 new expeditions with the mission of driving deeper discovery and promoting scientific enrichment.
On these PONANT-exclusive itineraries, Explorers Club members will join each departure to share their first-hand experiences of exploration and scientific research with travelers during onboard lectures. We are thrilled to be collaborating with PONANT to offer these truly extraordinary programs and we can’t wait to see you onboard!
Scott and Shackleton’s Antarctic – Ross Sea Expedition
January 26 – February 16, 2025
Natalie Hewit is an award-winning director and producer based in the UK. She has been making prime-time documentaries for major terrestrial and international broadcasters -including the BBC and National Geographic – for more than a decade. Her work has received widespread industry recognition and critical acclaim including a Royal Television Society Award for the BBC series Forensics: The Real CSI, and nominations for a Grierson Award and a BAFTA for the Channel 4 documentary Surviving Covid. With human narratives at their core, her projects have taken her to numerous remote and highly challenging locations including an expedition into the Canadian Yukon for the BBC series Operation Goldrush with Dan Snow. Her directorial debut saw her spend 3 months filming Antarctica: Ice Station Rescue at the Halley VI Research Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf for the BBC’s prestigious Horizon science series, which earned her a nomination for “Best Documentary” at the Broadcast Awards. Her most recent project, Endurance, marked her second visit to Antarctica, where she documented the expedition to find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance in the toughest conditions on the planet. In March 2023, Oscar-winning co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi joined Natalie on the team to bring Endurance to audiences for National Geographic Documentary Films. Natalie’s work has gained multiple 5-star reviews and been deemed “Essential” by the Financial Times and “haunting and powerful” by The Guardian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and has sat on awards juries for the Director’s Guild of America and grant panels for The Explorers Club.
Photo: The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust
Zanzibar, Aldabra & the Treasure of the Indian Ocean
February 24 – March 8, 2025
Peter B. Campbell, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Archaeology at Cranfield University in the UK. Originally from the Great Lakes region of the United States, he has directed underwater expeditions in eight countries. His PhD in Archaeology is from the University of Southampton in the UK, while his MA is from East Carolina University in the US. Peter’s research spans the world, from the cave lakes of North America and H.L. Hunley submarine (1863) to the Swedish warship Vasa (1628) in the Baltic Sea, to the world’s largest concentration of ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean at Fournoi, Greece, and the schooner Wawona in the Pacific. Recent research surveys the southern coast of Tanzania, revealing the intricacies of Indian Ocean trade. In addition to underwater archaeology, he is an expert in art crime investigation, directing the heritage crime program at Cranfield University. Working together with the OSCE, UN/UNESCO, INTERPOL, FBI, Carabinieri, US Homeland Security, Metropolitan Police, and other law enforcement agencies, he has developed forensic and training methods, and contributed to investigations of art and antiquities theft. Peter has appeared widely in the media, with his research covered by major news networks. His TED Ed lessons for students have been viewed over 5.4 million times. He has written articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Guardian, and appeared in documentaries airing on BBC, History, Discovery, and National Geographic.
Photo: Javier Mendoza
From the St. Lawrence to Greenland, the Last Moments of Winter
March 6 – 21, 2025
Michel Labrecque and Julie Ouimet, partners in life and exploration, are renowned for their intrepid journeys to some of the world’s most remote and uncharted destinations, including the Comoros and Oman. As internationally acclaimed underwater imagemakers, they have produced captivating visuals for major networks like Discovery and CBC, specializing in this unique field.
Their expertise in expedition logistics has taken them to some of the harshest environments on the planet. Both are Fellows of The Explorers Club (FI’16) and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. Michel and Julie co-organized two scientific missions with the honor of carrying The Explorers Club flag during the Clipperton Big Migrations 1 & 2 expeditions, that contributed to the establishment of a marine protected area. For their outstanding achievements in Field Science and Conservation, they were awarded The Explorers Club Citation of Merit in 2018. Additionally, they have co-authored numerous magazine articles and a coffee table book and are seasoned speakers and field guides.
Michel, an accomplished underwater photojournalist and commercial photographer, is also a skilled dive educator and Small Vessel Operator. He served as a lieutenant in the Royal 22nd Regiment (infantry), bringing a wealth of discipline and leadership to his expeditions.
Julie, a talented underwater expedition videographer and short film producer, has had her films showcased and awarded at festivals across Europe and North America. She is a member of the Ocean Artists Society and an inductee into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
With nearly 20 years of experience diving in the St. Lawrence, Michel and Julie have an unparalleled understanding of its underwater realm. In 2021, they co-founded Anticosti Ecotours, a land and underwater tour company based on Anticosti Island, Quebec, Canada’s newest UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo: James Stacey
Disko Bay: Meeting the Inuit & Discovering the Unknown
March 21 – April 5, 2025
George Kourounis is an explorer, storm chaser & TV presenter who has spent 25 years documenting extreme forces of nature and natural phenomena worldwide including tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, floods, and the effects of climate change.
He holds the title of National Geographic Explorer, Explorer In Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and served as the Canadian Chapter Chair of the Explorers Club.
Best known for having hosted the TV series “Angry Planet” he also co-hosted “Storm Hunters” for The Weather Network and is a regular on-camera contributor for “Strange Evidence” & “What On Earth?” on Science Channel. He’s appeared in programs for National Geographic, Discovery, Smithsonian Channel, Netflix, most of the major TV networks.
George has documented changes to melting permafrost in Siberia, sea level rise in Tuvalu, shifting tornado & hurricane patterns in North America, wildfires in Australia, and melting polar ice.
He also earned a Guinness World Record for being the first person to ever set foot at the bottom of the Darvaza “Doorway To Hell” flaming gas crater in remote Turkmenistan.
In 2014 he was awarded the Stefansson Medal from the Explorers Club Canadian Chapter “For outstanding contribution to science and to public education by documenting extreme environments through filmmaking.” In 2020 was awarded the Leif Erikson Exploration Award from the Exploration Museum in Iceland.
He frequently is asked to speak at events including 5 TEDx talks, the Global Exploration Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, and the United Nations Environmental Emergencies forum in Oslo, Norway.
Photo by Steven Faehrmann
Scottish Archipelagos and the Faroe Islands
May 21 – 30, 2025
Sefra Alexandra -The Seed Huntress- is an endurance race ethnobotanist on a perennial hunt to preserve the biodiversity of our wild and cultivated lands through seed conservation.
Through Her ethnobotanical expeditions she has studied with the Hopi in Arizona, USA; the Hadzabe in Tanzia; foraged for wild foods in the Amazon; and explored totem crops in the South Pacific and island nations around the world.
Sefra leads The Ecotype Project to amplify the amount of truly local native seed available for ecological restoration, creating the first ecoregional seed supply chain in the Northeast, USA. She is on the steering committee for the newly formed Northeast Seed Network and the Northeast Bioregional Education Coordinator for the Ecological Health Network.
In 2020 she began BOATanical.org where she guides ‘backyard expeditions’ with citizen scientists that are paddlin’ for the pollinators, planting native plants by boat along riparian corridors.
The Seed Huntress started the Southport Globe Onion Initiative to revive a prolific allium heirloom back to her home soils – initiating the annual Southport Globe Onion Festival.
She has conducted seed conservation fieldwork around the globe, fortifying community seed banks on island nations after natural disasters with Tactivate – a disaster response organization & The Readiness Collective, a resilience skills school she runs with her twin brother. She is a certified Permaculture educator, Edible Forest Garden designer, seed saver and wilderness skills instructor.
She was a Genebank Impacts Fellow of the Crop Trust and worked for Svalbard The Global Seed Vaults BOLD Project to safeguard seed collections of countries around the earth.
Sefra Alexandra holds her M.A.T. in Agroecological Education from Cornell University, is a WINGS WorldQuest expedition flag carrier, their Associate Board Explorer in Residence & a Member International of the Explorers Club. Her work has been featured in FORBES magazine.
Photo by Felix Kunze
In the Ice of the Arctic, from Greenland to Svalbard
June 21 – July 7, 2025
Katlin Bowman Adamczyk, Ph.D., is an American oceanographer who studies human impacts on the ocean. She has completed over a dozen expeditions spanning the globe including a 65-day journey to the North Pole, thousands of miles of hydrographic transects in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and seafloor exploration via human and remotely operated deep-sea vehicles. Katlin is recognized as an expert in the field of mercury biogeochemistry and has completed several projects investigating marine plastic debris. Recently, she spent six weeks in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean, working with a team of independent scientists to measure the environmental impacts of a pilot deep-sea mining operation. Katlin has been a National Geographic Explorer since 2018 and was named to the Explorers Club 50 list in 2024, which highlights individuals working to promote science and exploration. Originally from northeast Ohio, Katlin completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences at Wright State University in 2014 before heading west to California. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of California in Santa Cruz, where she is currently located.
Transarctic, the Quest for the Two North Poles
September 5 – 25, 2025
Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña, Ph.D, is the head of science communication for the University of Colorado Boulder’s Climate Adaptation Science Center. She’s a national fellow of The Explorers Club and holds a PhD in geological sciences, with a specialization in glaciology. Her research has covered the growth of supraglacial lakes and flooding on Himalayan glaciers, as well as the impacts of pollution and soot falling on snow and ice in high latitudes and altitudes. Ulyana has been the recipient of National Science Foundation and National Geographic grants for her research. By the time she turned 23, she had traveled to and worked on all 7 continents. Ulyana started Science in the Wild, her own citizen science initiative that has traveled to Nepal, Baffin Island, Kilimanjaro, and the Andes. Her husband, Ricardo, and her are climbing Colorado’s 100 highest peaks, the 50 US state highpoints, and the global 7 summits as part of their Summits, Songs and Science project, to bring awareness to the importance of fitness, culture, and scientific thinking in modern society. They both feature in a new documentary The Andes Tragedy: 50 Years Later, alongside Eduardo Strauch, one of the 16 survivors of Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes in 1972. In 2016, Ulyana was chosen as mission commander for the NASA Johnson Space Center’s HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) 30-day isolation experiment, simulating a long-duration mission to an asteroid. She was named one of 120 semifinalists out of 18,354 applicants for NASA’s 2017 astronaut class.
Photo by Morane Monneret
Journey to the Austral Lands and Valdes Penninsula
November 5 – 23, 2025
Natalie Schmitt, Ph.D., is an ecologist, conservation geneticist and documentary film maker with a long history of deep passion and dedication to finding new and innovative ways to address the underlying causes of our massive biodiversity crisis. As both the causes and the solutions involve people, Natalie’s focus has been multi-faceted, going beyond science to explore ways that we can connect with, inspire, understand, and empower people. Taking her inspiration from the Indigenous notion of two-eyed seeing, she is motivated to combine the scientific way of seeing the world with Indigenous knowledge, as well as the use of art and film to foster deep collaboration and inspiration for conservation.
Studying elusive, endangered species, like snow leopard, Natalie has worked at restoring harmony between people, livestock and wildlife in key snow leopard regions of Nepal with local NGO Pangje, to create safe corridors for snow leopards to flourish. Through her conservation genetic research on humpback whales and Antarctic blue whales with the Australian Antarctic Division, she has contributed to policy and management improvement at various scales, including that of the International Whaling Commission.
Over the past 8 years, Natalie has developed a portable leading-edge technology to detect DNA from biological samples in real time, at low cost and easy-to-use. She leads a skilled, synergic team of geneticists, conservationists, business partners, and institutions who have helped to make this possible. Together, WildTechDNA will revolutionize the way customs, law-enforcement, field monitoring practices, citizen science, and locally based conservation are conducted around the world.
Natalie was chosen as one of the Explorers Club 50 people changing the world that the world needs to know about in 2022. Her mission is centered around the belief that our environmental crisis is not an external, isolated problem but rather a human, societal and deeply personal challenge.
Photo by David Donnelly
In the Wake of Jean-Baptiste Charcot
December 5-20, 2025
Britney Schmidt, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. Inspired by understanding our home planet and searching for life beyond Earth, she and her team develop robotic tools and instruments to study Earth’s poles and other planets. Exploring Antarctica’s ice shelves and glaciers and the oceans beneath them with their robot Icefin, Schmidt and her team help to capture the impacts of changing climate, while understanding analogs for Ocean Worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa. Icefin is a robotic under ice vehicle built by a team of students and staff that can be deployed through thin holes in the ice and swim out to map the ocean, ice and seafloor conditions below ice shelves and glaciers. The team has used Icefin to explore underneath the McMurdo, Ross, and Fimbul Ice Shelves and Thwaites Glacier, working with NASA, NSF, Antarctica New Zealand, the British Antarctic Survey, and the Norwegian Polar Institute. Icefin’s first campaigns in Greenland will begin spring 2025. Through the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), Schmidt and colleagues from the US and UK deployed Icefin below Thwaites Glacier, showing for the first time how the grounding line of this rapidly changing system was melting. In recognition of the work of the ITGC team, she and colleague Peter Davis were named to the 100 Most Influential People of 2023 by Time Magazine. She has also been recognized by the Explorer’s Club as an EC 50 member, highlighting innovative explorers.
Schmidt received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Arizona, and PhD in Geophysics and Space Physics from UCLA. She has been involved with NASA spacecraft, including the Europa Clipper and Dawn missions and helped develop the Habitable Worlds Observatory, Europa Lander and Enceladus Orbilander concepts. Schmidt has conducted nine field seasons in Antarctica and three in the Arctic.
Photo by Julien Witwicky
Natural Sanctuaries & Caribbean Encounters
December 13-22, 2025
Ricardo A. Nascimento is a highly skilled and passionate underwater cinematographer, director and Sony Wildlife Photographer with over a decade of experience in the industry. Based in Lisbon, Portugal, Ricardo has carved out a niche for himself by capturing breathtaking footage of marine life, adventure, and sports projects around the globe. His work has taken him to some of the most remote and challenging underwater environments, where he utilizes his expertise in freediving and scuba diving to capture stunning visuals.
Ricardo’s journey began with a strong foundation in Mechanical Engineering, which he later combined with his artistic vision to excel in underwater cinematography. His technical skills are complemented by certifications such as AIDA 3 Advanced Freediver and PADI Advanced Open Water + Enriched Air Diver, enhancing his ability to work in diverse and demanding conditions. Ricardo is also an Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support Experienced Provider, ensuring the safety of his team during challenging shoots.
Throughout his career, Ricardo has collaborated with prestigious brands like Red Bull, Lexus, EDP Global, and NEOM Tourism, producing documentaries and branded content that highlight his storytelling prowess and deep connection with the ocean. His films have been showcased at renowned festivals, including the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals, earning him accolades and a loyal audience.
A Fellow Member of The Explorers Club, Ricardo is dedicated to raising awareness about the ocean’s beauty and fragility. His ultimate goal is to inspire others through untold stories, advocating for the preservation and sustainability of marine environments for future generations. Whether filming the majestic manta rays of the Azores or documenting the impact of environmental disasters, Ricardo’s work continues to captivate and educate audiences worldwide.
Photo by David Ochoa
The Emperor Penguins of the Weddell Sea
December 19, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Cassandra Brooks, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She draws on a diversity of disciplines including marine science, environmental policy, and science communication, with the last 15 years of her career focused on Antarctica. She completed a PhD at Stanford University, studying international ocean policy, with a focus on marine protection in the Antarctic. She was also a core member of The Last Ocean, a grand-scale media project focused on protecting the Ross Sea, Antarctica – one of healthiest and most productive marine ecosystems left on Earth. In 2016, these collaborative efforts helped drive the adoption of the world’s largest MPA in the Ross Sea. For her efforts she was awarded a Switzer Fellowship in Environmental Leadership. She completed a MS at Moss Landing Marine Labs, studying Antarctic toothfish in the Ross Sea, a population that supports the most remote fishery on Earth. Dr. Brooks has worked in the lab, underwater, and at sea – including toiling as a federal fisheries observer on New England groundfish boats and five research cruises to Antarctica – and has presented and published her work around the world. Cassandra is also trained as a Science Communicator through the University of California Santa Cruz and has published more than 150 articles and multi-media stories about marine science and the environment. As the Deputy Chief Officer for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s Standing Committee on the Antarctic Treaty System she participates in annual meetings of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which governs the Southern Ocean. Cassandra also recently became science faculty for Homeward Bound, a ground-breaking women’s leadership initiative set in Antarctica.
Photo by Christina Riesselman
Expedition to New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands
December 29, 2025 – January 12, 2026
Natalie Hewit is an award-winning director and producer based in the UK. She has been making prime-time documentaries for major terrestrial and international broadcasters -including the BBC and National Geographic – for more than a decade. Her work has received widespread industry recognition and critical acclaim including a Royal Television Society Award for the BBC series Forensics: The Real CSI, and nominations for a Grierson Award and a BAFTA for the Channel 4 documentary Surviving Covid. With human narratives at their core, her projects have taken her to numerous remote and highly challenging locations including an expedition into the Canadian Yukon for the BBC series Operation Goldrush with Dan Snow. Her directorial debut saw her spend 3 months filming Antarctica: Ice Station Rescue at the Halley VI Research Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf for the BBC’s prestigious Horizon science series, which earned her a nomination for “Best Documentary” at the Broadcast Awards. Her most recent project, Endurance, marked her second visit to Antarctica, where she documented the expedition to find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance in the toughest conditions on the planet. In March 2023, Oscar-winning co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi joined Natalie on the team to bring Endurance to audiences for National Geographic Documentary Films. Natalie’s work has gained multiple 5-star reviews and been deemed “Essential” by the Financial Times and “haunting and powerful” by The Guardian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and has sat on awards juries for the Director’s Guild of America and grant panels for The Explorers Club.
Photo by Esther Horvath & the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust
