A Teacher, an Artist, a Scientist and More. They’re All Visionaries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/world/visionaries-pushing-boundaries.html

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One wanted to be a professional basketball player. Another wanted to be a dancer. And someone else wanted to be an astronaut. They all ended up making impacts in different careers.

For our series on Visionaries, The Times interviewed 12 people who are taking risks and working to change the world.

Technology visionary: Jeri Ellsworth

Ms. Ellsworth began playing pinball when she worked in a bowling alley as a teenager, and a manager there would occasionally give her a few free credits. Today, she has a collection of more than 70 pinball machines, but her passion has moved from the mechanical into a new digital augmented reality, which she believes will be the future of entertainment.

Ms. Ellsworth, 45, is a self-taught computer hacker and chip designer who recently started a new augmented reality gaming company, Tilt Five, based in San Jose, Calif. She is emblematic of a generation of Silicon Valley hobbyists who were passionate about computers and only later turned their passions into commercial enterprises. She originally gained visibility as an independent computer chip designer living in a rural ramshackle farmhouse in Yamhill, Ore. Read more

FOOD VISIONARY: Steve Palmer

Mr. Palmer has opened dozens of restaurants over the course of his career. He knows how to coax the best flavors out of a piece of fish, how to light a restaurant so all the customers look good and how to make a couple celebrating an anniversary feel special.

But 18 years ago, he was so strung out on alcohol and cocaine that his boss at the restaurant where he worked gave him an ultimatum: Get treatment or get fired.

He chose rehab. Now, Mr. Palmer, 50, is the managing partner of Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which employs about a thousand people in 20 restaurants and bars that stretch across four Southern states and Washington. Read more

Style visionary: Iris van Herpen

When many people think of couture they think of the most traditional, time-intensive kind of fashion; of seamstresses and tailors in white coats bent over intricate swathes of material painstakingly sewing by hand the way they have since the days of Charles Frederick Worth and Christian Dior (and Marie Antoinette, for that matter).

Ms. van Herpen, however, a 35-year-old Dutch designer who founded her own company in 2007, has always thought of something different.

She has thought of the way the sewing needle — an early tool — might translate into the tools of tomorrow; might, for example, connect to the 3-D printer and the laser cutter. She has explored such themes as “biopiracy” and “magnetic motion;” has combined mylar and copper with tulle and organza. Her dresses often appear to have their own energy field and look as though they are terraforming the body. Read more

Education Visionary: Jeff Duncan-Andrade

Sometimes it is the child who hates school who cares most about fixing its failings.

Which is how you can think of Mr. Duncan-Andrade. The youngest of seven — who was born in Los Angeles and whose family moved from to Sacramento to Oregon to Oakland, Calif., during his school years — found his teachers uninspiring. He only went to school to play ball.

But sports, specifically travel basketball, opened his eyes to the gulf between toxic coaches and those who forged relationships. Today, as an education activist, teacher, education coach, San Francisco State University associate professor and scholar, he is driving a public conversation that upends traditional beliefs about reforming schools and achieving equity. Read more

Culture Visionary: Shirin Neshat

Ms. Neshat has had an unusual trajectory to art world prominence. The artist left her native Iran as a teenager in the 1970s, before the revolution and the fall of the shah, and ended up studying at the University of California, Berkeley. By her own account, she didn’t end up making art seriously until her early 30s. But Ms. Neshat, 62, has become one of the most distinct practitioners in the media of photography, video and film.

Now New York-based and working with several assistants in a large Bushwick studio, Ms. Neshat makes art that touches on topics like exile, political revolution and Iran’s past and future. The biggest exhibition of her career, “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again,” runs from Oct. 19 to Feb. 16 at The Broad in Los Angeles. Read more

science visionary: Edith Heard

Twice in her life, Professor Heard has transformed scientific understanding.

She studies epigenetics — changes to genetic activity that can be passed down to daughter cells without affecting the underlying genetic code. Among bees, for example, a simple difference in food supply means that a larva becomes either a worker or a queen.

Professor Heard’s first major advance was showing that these kinds of epigenetic changes can be incredibly dynamic, particularly as an embryo forms and matures. In her second, she revealed important information about how parts of the genome fold in space, allowing some genes to be activated and others silenced.

In January, Professor Heard took over as head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, or E.M.B.L., a scientific collaboration among 27 European countries. She received her bachelor’s degree in genetics from Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College and her doctorate in biochemistry from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. She is also a professor at the Collège de France. Read more

architecture visionary: Vo Trong Nghia

As city dwellers seek to soften the expanding urban jungle around them, architects are working harder to incorporate greenery and natural materials. But nobody is doing it quite like Mr. Nghia.

His firm, Vo Trong Nghia Architects, based in Ho Chi Minh City, infuses its work with lushly planted walls, hanging vines, structure-piercing trees, weathered stones and sunken landscapes. It also incorporates traditional Vietnamese building techniques, like complex bamboo trusses, perforated blocks, cooling water systems, shaded terraces and thatched roofs. Mr. Nghia’s firm also is expanding into prefab housing, urban farms, green towers, parks and urban plans around Asia.

All these efforts are infused with a resolute vision: the creation of architecture that merges nature, local vernacular and — through modern materials and methods — contemporary design. Mr. Nghia sees such work as a way not only to refine the urban environment, but also to provide a sense of peace in the world. Read more

agriculture visionary: Thomas Njeru

Few livelihoods offer as many paths to failure as agriculture. Throughout history, farmers have been at the mercy of nature — be it weather, pests or crop diseases — even as the survival of people and livestock depended on their success.

Growing up on a farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya, Mr. Njeru witnessed firsthand the devastating impact such setbacks had on the lives of small landholders, including his own family. His mother lectured him to work hard in school so he could one day leave the farm and land a good job in the city. Mr. Njeru followed that advice obediently — until he did not.

Today, he is a co-founder and the chief financial officer of Pula, a four-year-old microinsurance firm that serves 1.7 million smallholder farms of 0.6 acres or less in 10 African countries and India. Read more

infrastructure visionary: james ehrlich

For Mr. Ehrlich, farm-to-table is just a starting point for the future.

The New York native, who migrated to Silicon Valley decades ago, is the founder and president of ReGen Villages, which seeks to create self-reliant ecosystems globally.

Mr. Ehrlich is anything but a typical real estate developer. Instead, his company, which he started in 2016, derives from his concern for the environment and his love of farming communities. His idea is to establish a far-reaching plan to create new neighborhoods that will generate their own power through solar photovoltaic panels, biomass and biogas from material, food and animal waste, and geothermal sources, to name but a few. Read more

sports visionary: Rich Luker

The sports world is filled with people whose job is to sell tickets, advertisements, sponsorships, luxury boxes and all manner of game-day experiences. The more, the better. Any fan will do.

Dr. Luker has tried to get those managers, supervisors and executives to look for something more profound, something he calls “lifetime value.”

To Dr. Luker, the most concrete iteration of that concept is the idea that passionate fans would get a tattoo of their favorite team’s logo to show that it is part of their core identity.

This is just one of the discoveries he has made over the past 25 years as the founder of Luker On Trends, a sports polling company that works with many professional sports leagues and teams. Read more

BUSINESS VISIONARY: Andrew Kassoy

Sometimes it’s better not to know the obstacles that exist when creating something new.

That was certainly true for Mr. Kassoy, who, along with Jay Coen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan, two friends and roommates from Stanford University, wanted to encourage companies to focus on their employees and the environment. In 2006, they left their jobs and created B Lab, which certifies companies that operate for social good, in addition to trying to make money. Think Fair Trade for food or LEED certification for environmentally sustainable buildings.

Certified companies — referred to as B Corps — are businesses with verified social and environmental performances, including factors such as sustainability, income inequality and the impact on local communities. They are, essentially, companies that use business as a force of good, rather than focusing solely on profit maximization. Read more

Climate Visionary: Narasimha Rao

When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost. They discuss the threats to gross domestic product, the havoc wrought by natural disasters or the runaway greenhouse gas emissions released by emerging national economies.

To Mr. Rao, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies specializing in energy systems analysis, that is a false choice, one that sacrifices justice on the altar of economic growth. Read more