I’ve been photographing Victor Dzau for the better part of a decade, watching him move through the grand halls of science and policy with the ease of someone who has spent a lifetime bridging the two. This portrait was made at the National Academies’ historic building on the National Mall, a place steeped in the weight of American scientific ambition. Dzau carries that weight lightly but deliberately, his presence, like his work, is measured, precise, and deeply engaged with the future of medicine.

Born in China, trained in the West, he made his mark first as a physician, then as a scientist, and finally as a leader who could shape the very structure of healthcare itself. In the 1980s, his research helped lay the foundation for ACE inhibitors, a class of drugs that changed the way we treat high blood pressure and heart failure. The implications were vast, millions of lives extended, millions more made livable. But Dzau didn’t stop at the lab bench. He had the rare ability to see medicine not just as a collection of discoveries but as an interconnected system, where the right intervention at the right level, whether molecular or political, could shift the trajectory of global health.

At the National Academy of Medicine, where he has served as president since 2014, he has worked to shape that system with a steady hand. He has led the charge on pandemic preparedness, recognizing long before COVID-19 that the world was unready for what was coming. He has pushed medicine beyond the clinic and into the realm of climate change, artificial intelligence, and the future of aging. His vision is expansive: not just to heal individuals, but to reimagine the way societies approach health itself.

Watching him work, I’ve often thought about how certain people seem to bend the arc of history. Dzau does it not with force but with quiet persistence, a belief that the next breakthrough is always possible, if only we are willing to build the right structures to support it.