Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz wanted more from her portraits than a photograph that announced her profession. A white coat or a microscope tells us instantly that someone is a scientist, yet that visual shorthand can also flatten a person. Magda has spent her career studying how embryos develop, and she also cares intensely about clothes, architecture, and beauty. When we talked about making her portraits, she had no interest in disappearing into a costume of authority.
I made most of her photographs at her home in 2026, then photographed her again the following day at the Athenaeum at Caltech. Few people I have worked with have brought such a practiced eye to a sitting. Magda noticed how fabric fell and how a color worked against its background. She was exacting and playful, invested in the decisions we were making together and in how each frame held together.
Her scientific questions reach back to the earliest stages of development, before there is a recognizable body. Cells that initially appear similar begin to take on distinct roles. Some form the embryo itself; others contribute to the tissues that sustain it. Magda has spent decades asking how those first distinctions arise and how neighboring cells coordinate their development.
Much of that process becomes hidden once an embryo implants in the womb. Studying isolated cells reveals only so much because their behavior depends on the tissues around them. Magda and her colleagues have helped develop embryo models made entirely from stem cells, allowing researchers to investigate those relationships directly.
In work reported in 2022, her team combined three types of mouse stem cells representing the embryo and its supporting tissues. Given the right conditions, the cells organized into structures with developing brain regions, a neural tube, and a beating heart-like structure.
The supporting cells mattered. Cells destined to become part of the body received signals from neighboring populations that would never belong to it. Including those populations helped the models develop further. The researchers supplied the starting cells and the environment; the cells carried out the organization.
The models also allowed the team to test what happens when a genetic instruction is missing. Removing a gene important in nervous system development produced corresponding defects in the developing brain. Researchers could examine a gene’s role while the tissues were forming.
Her group has also developed human stem-cell models that reproduce aspects of development after implantation. These are incomplete representations, with important differences from embryos. They nevertheless offer ways to investigate a stage when many pregnancies fail and when the origins of developmental disorders can be difficult to observe.
Making her portraits at home gave Magda room to bring her other interests into our work. There was no reason her taste should disappear because she was being photographed as a scientist. Over those two days, I came to know something of her playfulness and the care she took with things she loved. I had come because of her science. She wanted the photographs to leave room for the rest of her. I was glad she insisted.
