Robert_Sapolsky.jpg: Bill Branson for the National Institutes of Health Record derivative work: P. S. Burton · Public domain

A neuroendocrinologist at Stanford whose decades of fieldwork studying wild baboons in Kenya established how chronic social stress reshapes the body and brain, work that reframed stress as a biological process rather than just a psychological one. He has also become one of science's most effective public communicators, translating that research for a general audience through widely read books and lectures.