David Hempleman-Adams, FI'00, polar expeditioner, mountaineer, balloonist and pilot, was born in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1956. He is a graduate from Manchester, a post-graduate from Bristol and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester. He is a director of three companies and a trustee of The Mitchemp Trust. His awards include the MBE and OBE in the Queen’s Honours List, The Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Livingstone Medal, and The Royal Humane Society's Bronze Award for bravery.
One of the world's most successful all-around adventurers, Hempleman-Adams has engaged in a fifteen-year odyssey of exploration which has placed him in the record books and which has seen him conquer the North and South Magnetic Poles together in a single year and scale the highest mountain in each of the seven Continents, including Everest.
Hempleman-Adams' interest in expeditioning began with the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, for which he holds a Gold medal. He is an accomplished mountaineer, having climbed some of the highest mountains in the world, including Everest in Nepal, Mount Vinson in Antarctica, Aconcagua in Argentina, Carstenz Pyramid in Indonesia, Elbrus in Russia, and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
He was a member of the team, which in 1981 achieved one of the fastest ascents of Mount McKinley, Alaska. And in 1984 he was the first person to successfully complete a solo expedition to the North Pole without the support of dogs, snow mobiles, or air supplies. Then in 1992 he led the first team to walk unsupported to the North Pole. In 1996 he became the only person ever to reach both North and South Poles in one year.
In December 1998, with only thirty hours of flying experience, Hempleman-Adams took off in the Typhoon Challenger hot air balloon with open wicker basket from a polo field in Chile. The balloon rose to more than 32,000 feet before catching westerly winds into Argentina; the total journey lasted five and a half hours.
In June 2000, he became the first person to solo pilot a balloon to the North Pole. He set a number of ballooning records on this flight, including distance record for the Arctic at 1,400 kilometers to the North Pole ring and 2,451 kilometers total, first balloonist to fly solo to the North Pole, and first balloonist to fly solo across the Arctic Ocean.
In September 2003, Hempleman-Adams succeeded in becoming the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an open wicker-basket Roziere balloon. His other ballooning records include first solo hot air balloon flight across the Andes, first crossing of the North West Passage, duration record for a Roziere-90 balloon flight, distance record from land for an Arctic flight, duration record for an Arctic flight, first person to fly a balloon from land to the North Pole, and first successful crossing of the Atlantic in an open wicker-basket Roziere balloon.
Michael J. Manyak, MD, FN'92, is professor of urology, microbiology, and tropical medicine and chairman of the Department of Urology at The George Washington University Medical Center (GWUMC) in Washington, DC. He received his undergraduate degree at University of Notre Dame, his MD at University of the East in Manila, Philippines, and his urology training at GWUMC and was a scholar at the National Cancer Institute, where he completed a fellowship in biotechnology. He has served on numerous national committees related to medicine and biotechnology; published over one hundred and seventy-five professional abstracts, book chapters, and refereed journal articles; has been granted ten patents with several pending; and is on the scientific advisory board or consultant to more than twenty biomedical technology companies. Dr. Manyak was profiled by the Washingtonian Magazine in December 2001 as one of fifty people selected as "The Best and Brightest" of Washington. He has made numerous appearances on national networks for CBS, NBC, Fox News, and CNN and has been the guest of John McLaughlin on One On One.
Dr. Manyak maintains an avid interest in field exploration and expedition medicine. He is a former chairman of The Explorers Club's Washington chapter. He has chaired the Expeditions Committee since 1995 and in 1997 was appointed to the Science Advisory Board, which he now chairs. He has served on the Board of Directors since 1996. He has served on the Nominating, Public Relations, and Chapter Relations committees and his column on expedition medicine has appeared in The Explorers Journal. Manyak is responsible for significant corporate sponsorship and has sponsored nineteen new members in the last eighteen months. He participated in several scuba diving reef expeditions in Batangas, Philippines, which evaluated and helped ban dynamite fishing on reef habitats and explored Apo Reef in the Sulu Sea for the Philippine Ministry of Agriculture. He also was co-leader for a scientific expedition to the Ndoki rain forest in the Congo Basin in a collaborative effort with the World Wildlife Fund, has dived the Spanish galleon "Nuestra Senora de Atocha" in search of artifacts, and carried The Explorers Club flag for the RMS Titanic salvage expedition in 2000, where he was the medical director and dove to the Titanic wrecksite in the Russian MIR submersible.
Monika Rogozinska, MI'93, was born in Warsaw and studied Polish literature and cultural studies at Warsaw University, where she completed an MA degree and wrote her thesis on romantic drama and theatre. Unable to work as a journalist because Poland had no free media at that time, she moved to a mountain hut in the remote Valley of Five Lakes in Tatras, the highest part of the Carpathian Range. She lived there, worked in kitchens and at reception desks, and became a volunteer member of the Mountain Rescue Service, taking part in rescue operations. After training to receive a license, she worked as a Tatra Mountain Guide. After a dozen years she came back to Warsaw and worked at the Mickiewicz Literary Society--the oldest such society in Poland. When Poland became free, she became a journalist.
As a mountaineer she has climbed in the Tatras and the Alps and hiked in the Andes. In 1980 during the Polish Mt Everest Expedition, which approached from the Nepal side, she climbed Ice Fall and entered Everest Camp. She was one of the first women from Europe to set foot in this place. She has helped to organize expeditions and has taken part in the winter exploration of the Himalayas and Karakorum as a journalist for Rzeczpospolita, Poland's most respected national daily newspaper. She was part of the first-ever winter expedition to K2 from the north side.
Rogozinska has pioneered the use of electronic communications equipment in low temperatures and harsh conditions. In the aftermath of an earthquake and avalanche on Nanga Parbat in the late 1980s, this equipment was instrumental in the rescue of one of her colleagues. She has broadcast live on Polish radio from these winter expeditions in the highest mountains. During the last winter K2 expedition, on which her team had the privilege to carry The Explorers Club flag, she sent films and news reports watched on Polish television by 4 million people.
In 1993 Rogozinska, with Maciej Kuczynski, helped found the Polish Chapter of The Explorers Club, where she continues to serve in the post of chapter secretary. She continues to write for Rzeczpospolita, covering exploration, science, extreme sports, travel, and history. She works with many networks of Polish radio and television, is published in various magazines, and has edited several books, including the Polish edition of Everest: History of the Himalayan Giant by Roberto Mantovani. She has two sons and lives in Warsaw.
Wade Davis, PhD, holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his doctorate in ethnobotany from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, ethnobotanist, and photographer, living among fifteen tribal groups in eight Latin American nations while making some six thousand botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller which was later released by Universal as a motion picture. Other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), and Shadows in the Sun (1992, 1998), One River (1996), and Rainforest (1999). A book of Davis' photographs, Light at the Edge of the World, was published in 2002. Recently his work has taken him to Morocco, Jordan, Borneo, Colombia, and Tibet.
A native of British Columbia, Davis has worked as a park ranger, forestry engineer, logger, and big game hunting guide and conducted ethnographic fieldwork among indigenous societies of northern Canada. He has published some fifty scientific articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. His magazine credits Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, and others. He has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, California Academy of Sciences, Missouri Botanical Garden, Field Museum of Natural History, New York Botanical Garden, National Geographic Society, America's Society, Royal Ontario Museum, Royal British Columbia Museum, and The Explorers Club, as well as major universities including Harvard, Yale, Tulane, Vanderbilt, M.I.T., University of North Carolina, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, University of Colorado and University of Wisconsin. His photographs have been widely published and exhibited at several galleries including the International Center of Photography, in New York.
Presently a research associate of the Instituto Caribe de Antropologia y Sociologia in Caracas, Venezuela, he is an honorary research associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, a collaborator in Botany at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, research associate of the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, a fellow of the Linnean Society and the executive director of the Endangered People's Project. Since 1994 Davis has served as vice president for ethnobotany and conservation at Andes Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a development stage biotech company engaged in biodiversity prospecting in the Andes and Amazon of South America.
Television credits include Earthguide, a thirteen part series which aired on the Discovery Channel, and the award winning documentaries The Spirit of the Mask, and Cry of the Forgotten Land. His documentary film Forests Forever is a critical examination of forest policy in British Columbia. In addition to his writing and research, Dr. Davis is currently serving as a scientific consultant to Warner Bros. for an upcoming feature film based on the Penan of north Borneo.
Davis is married to Gail Percy, an anthropologist, and when not in the field they divide their time between Washington D.C., Vancouver, and their fishing lodge in the Stikine Valley of northern British Columbia. They have two children, Tara and Raina.
Graham Hawkes, FN'86, an internationally renowned engineer and inventor, has been responsible for the design of a significant percentage of manned and remote underwater vehicles built for research or industry worldwide, including the Wasp and Mantis Atmospheric Diving Suits, the Deep Rover research submersibles, and the experimental Deep Flight submersibles. His most recent invention, the revolutionary winged submersible, Deep Flight Aviator, is a unique undersea vehicle, flown like an airplane underwater, that will enable scientists and engineers of all disciplines to explore, survey, collect, and record information from ocean depths to 1,500 feet. Hawkes plans to take the next generation sub, Deep Flight II, to the deepest point on the planet: the Mariana Trench, at 37,000 feet beneath the ocean's surface. He currently holds the world record for the deepest solo ocean dive, at 3000 feet, which he achieved while test piloting the Deep Rover.
Hawkes has successfully founded and managed five high-technology engineering companies, including Precision Remotes, Inc., which manufactures remote land-based systems for the military, and Hawkes Ocean Technologies (HOT), which designs and manufactures state-of-the-art manned submersibles. Some of HOT's latest projects include:
Deep Flight/Ocean Everest, a project to build revolutionary manned submersibles to access deep waters, including full ocean depth; The Deep Flight Wet Flight, a new two person underwater flight trainer; Wet Flight, a radical filming platform for underwater TV and film projects; and a mock up of the Deep Rover submersibles for the feature film, Sphere.
In the early 1990s, Hawkes also co-founded Deep Ocean Engineering, which manufactures a significant portion of Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) now in use worldwide. In the 1980s, Hawkes designed the Sensory Manipulator Systems used by the U.S. Navy, NASA, and AT&T for various underwater vehicles. In 1989, he founded Deep Sea Discoveries, a commercial marine archeology company that located over 350 shipwrecks.
In the late 1970s, Graham Hawkes co-founded Offshore Systems Engineering, where he designed and managed the manufacturing of the atmospheric diving systems, Wasp and Mantis. Previously, Hawkes refined the design of the atmospheric diving system, the JIM suit, for operation in depths of 2,000 feet. Hawkes has worked as an engineer in the United Kingdom at Plessey Underwater Weapons Unit and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Widely considered the leader in his field, in 1987 Hawkes was named an associate laureate for the Rolex Award for Enterprise, and in 1996 and 1997 Design News nominated him for Engineer of the Year. In 1997, he received the Design News Special Achievement Award. In 1998, he was a finalist in the Discover Awards for Innovation, and in 2000, Hawkes Ocean Technologies received the Computerworld Smithsonian Award (Science Category), which recognizes individuals and organizations who have demonstrated vision and leadership as they use information technology to benefit society.
Hawkes' work has been featured in the global press, including: The New York Times, London Times, Financial Times, Business Week, Time Magazine, National Geographic,
CNN, Dateline NBC, among many others. Graham Hawkes is a Fellow of The Explorers Club and recipient of its Lowell Thomas Medal.
