Wellcome Photography Prize judges

Melanie Keen is Director of Wellcome Collection, and its vision is a world where everyone’s experience of health matters. Her intention is to give voice to radical imagination on what health is and what it could be.

She is committed to reshaping our cultural assumptions around race, disability and gender, and the human relationship to planetary health and health equity. A graduate of the RCA (Royal College of Art), Melanie has worked as a curator, as a senior manager in arts policy and funding at the Arts Council England. Prior to joining Wellcome Collection in 2019, she was Director and Chief Curator at pioneering arts organisation Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).⁠ 

She is an advisor at the Government Art Collection; on the Board of Visitors of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; and a trustee of Raven Row gallery, London. She has served as a judge on several important panels and most recently, she was on the jury for the Turner Prize 2023, and also a judge for the Dezeen Awards 2024.⁠ 

She speaks regularly at public events and in 2022, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London (UAL) for her contribution to curation and arts management.⁠

Benjamin Ryan has been an independent journalist for nearly a quarter of a century. He specialises in covering science and healthcare, in particular as they intersect with public policy. He contributes to NBC News, the New York Post and The New York Sun. He has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Nation, Thomson Reuters Foundation, New York, and The Marshall Project. His photography has accompanied his reporting in The Guardian, The New York Sun and NBC News. A native of Seattle, he graduated cum laude from Columbia University and lives in New York City, USA.

Caroline is a picture editor for the Guardian Saturday Magazine. She has over 20 years’ experience of commissioning a wide range of photography and reviewing photo-stories and proposals. Caroline is a regular portfolio reviewer at international photo festivals and has acted as a jury member for a number of photography competitions and awards.

Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer based in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. She is a Catchlight Fellow, a multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, and the founder of Women Photograph, a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists.

Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonisation, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. Her ongoing project, Signs of Your Identity, is the recipient of the Arnold Newman Prize, a Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award, the FotoEvidence Book Award, the Magnum Foundation's Inge Morath Award, and part of Open Society Foundation's Moving Walls 24. You can find her work in National Geographic Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, BuzzFeed, TIME, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Daniella is also currently a Professor of Practice at Tulane University, was a visiting professor at Wake Forest University from 2018-2020 and the 2022 T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the University of Montana. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture in 2009.

Elizabeth is a multi-award-winning global environmentalist and young African climate leader from Kenya. She is the Founder of the Green Generation Initiative (GGI), a youth-led organisation focused on environmental restoration, climate action, and sustainability in Kenya and across Africa.

Recognised globally for her impact, Elizabeth is a TIME100 Impact Award recipient and also a Commissioner on the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW), serving alongside notable leaders such as H.E. President Tharman Shanmugaratnam (President, Republic of Singapore), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Director General, World Trade Organization), Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Professor Johan Rockström.

Through her work, Elizabeth champions nature-based solutions, youth leadership, and global environmental advocacy, inspiring action for a more sustainable and resilient future.

Esmita is an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She focuses on intersectional research in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), for example, the PROTEA study across South Africa and India. She is the Co-Principal Investigator of CAMO-Net South Africa Hub, and a Contributing Investigator to CIDRI-Africa at the University of Cape Town.

In the UK, she is an Honorary Reader in Infectious Diseases, AMR and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. Her work in AMR has been recognised through the Academy of Medical Sciences UK-India AMR Visiting Professor Award. She is involved in mentoring and supporting clinical pharmacists and researchers across different healthcare settings and economies in implementing antimicrobial stewardship interventions.

Her work on equity in global health, includes representation of people through imagery. She has led the development of a framework for the ethical representation of people in imagery in global health and has been advocating for this with organisations and through collaboration with the South African community-based nonprofit organisation Eh!woza.

Helen L. Fisher is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, and ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London. Her multidisciplinary programme of research focuses on the role of social, psychological, biological, and wider environmental factors in the development, course, and prevention of mental health problems in children, adolescents, and young adults.

Helen leads the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, which has extensively followed 2,232 twins born in 1994-1995 across England and Wales from ages 5 to 30. This provides an invaluable resource for researchers across the globe to better understand the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in the onset, persistence, and prevention of mental health and behavioural problems.

Helen is also extremely passionate about finding ways to creatively engage the general public to better understand mental ill-health to hopefully reduce stigma and increase help-seeking. She has consulted on numerous plays and participated in post-show audience discussions, co-created immersive hearing voices experiences, and co-produced a mental health themed audio tour of the National Gallery. She also champions the involvement of people with lived experience in all aspects of research.

Mark is Founder and Director of the UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging, one of the world’s leading imaging centres. Mark is a pioneer in the development of imaging technologies for diagnosis and treatment. Last year Mark was awarded the prestigious IET Achievement Medal for a major and distinguished contribution in Medical Imaging, presented at the ‘Global Engineering Oscars’.

Mark's multidisciplinary approach bridges the domains of healthcare engineering and clinical medicine, enabling multiple imaging breakthroughs and securing £45 million for his collaborative research program. As Director of the UCL Department of Imaging, Mark has played a crucial role in the translation of several cutting-edge cancer imaging developments into clinical practice. He is also Director of Biomedical Imaging Research at the Francis Crick Institute, London.

Mark is passionate about the public engagement of science. During his Directorship of the Cheltenham Science Festival, it has become one of the largest science festivals in the world. Mark has presented programmes for the BBC, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Channel 4 and multiple series for BBC radio. Mark’s contributions have garnered awards from the Royal Society of Medicine, British Neuroscience Association, and the Royal Photographic Society. He is a Fellow of the British Science Association.

Noah completed his doctoral and postdoctoral training in neuroscience at Vanderbilt University. During this time, he discovered a passion for science education and communication.

After completing his training, he started a digital science and education consulting business aimed at furthering the development, dissemination and implementation of open access education and communication resources. He had the privilege of working with non-profits and initiatives across the United States, such as The Science Communication Lab, The Explorer’s Guide to Biology, The Postdoc Academy, The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project, and more.

Noah currently leads the Beautiful Biology initiative at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Beautiful Biology utilises stunning visuals from the life sciences to inspire a sense of awe and curiosity in the public and students.