Last August, professor emerita of biology Susan McConnell was slapped by a humpback whale. Photographing in Tonga, McConnell was in the water with whale mothers and calves when a male humpback swam underneath her.

“I had to tuck up like a cannonball, and as he swam under, he lifted his pectoral fin and slapped me on the thigh,” she said. “I was terrified because he could kill me easily. But he knew exactly what he was doing. He thought it was hilarious.”

Photographing since 2005, McConnell’s photos have been featured in Smithsonian and National Geographic, as well as Stanford’s Art Gallery. In addition to her website, McConnell’s main platform is social media, including Facebook and Instagram to share photographs that accompany her written stories.

“I feel like I’m going to reach people who might not necessarily gravitate toward the kinds of issues that are important to me, and so I try to put things out there that folks will see,” she said.

Outside of photography, McConnell is a working biologist. She joined Stanford’s faculty in 1989 and has since been recognized with the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. She also co-chaired the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford from 2010 to 2012, the origin of the university’s Thinking Matters program and the WAYS breadth requirements. This work led her to co-create the Senior Reflection in Biology Capstone course with biology lecturer Andrew Todhunter in 2010, designed for students to explore science through creative forms.

Biology professor Deborah Gordon wrote to The Daily that McConnell “brings warmth, beauty, genuine commitment and lucidity to everything she does, including her science, teaching, and nature photography.”

Growing up in Northwest Indiana, McConnell said she was always crazy about animals. Dogs, hamsters, gerbils, parakeets, tadpoles, rabbits — “I’d keep any kind of pet that my mom would allow me to have,” McConnell said. Watching chick and duck eggs hatch in elementary school, she would always be the first to volunteer to take the newborn animals home.

McConnell still remembers a “pivotal moment” when she was 10 years old and her parents set out a stack of National Geographic magazines next to the TV. One issue spotlighted Jane Goodall in Tanzania, where the scientist was studying chimpanzees. “I was like ‘Oh my god, I want to be her,’” McConnell said. For her, “That’s where the draw to science started.”

McConnell studied biology at Harvard as an undergraduate, while also taking classes on animal behavior, physiology and comparative anatomy with the goal of becoming a field biologist. However, setbacks on the path to becoming a field biologist led her to work with Howard Gardner at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a biology research assistant after completing her undergraduate degree in 1980. Within months of learning about developmental neuroscience in animals, McConnell realized neurobiology was her calling. 

“I was always interested in the big question of innate versus learned behavior, and when I started to read about neurobiology, I realized that that question had to do with neural circuits,” McConnell said. After obtaining her Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard in 1987, she continued to focus on neural circuits in the developing cerebral cortex in her own laboratory at Stanford.

After over three decades at Stanford, the most fulfilling part of being a faculty member for McConnell has been her students. “It’s such a privilege to be able to interact with [students] as young people, navigating [their] own decisions, career choices, choices about majors, and trying to help students…showing [students] these worlds that are so exciting,” she said.

In BIO 158: Developmental Neurobiology, McConnell developed a teaching style to engage her students in active learning. “I want students to learn how to think like a scientist,” McConnell said. “That kind of thinking isn’t just pure creativity, it’s systematic.”

“Every lecture I gave was a story that would unfold about a major set of discoveries, and having students be the ones at every step to say, ‘Here’s what I would do next, this is my idea,’” McConnell added. “They were the scientists.”

McConnell also teaches BIO 7N: Conversation Photography. This winter, she took her students to Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing, photographing sea otters, harbor seals, sea lions and bird life from a pontoon boat. McConnell says she enjoys “just being out on the water for the morning with the wind and nothing you’re supposed to be doing except taking pictures, just being present.”

For McConnell, conservation photography is “all about storytelling, but it’s also about community.”

Maya Xu ’25, a former student of McConnell’s, told The Daily that she met some of her closest friends from taking BIO 7N during her frosh year.

“It was a really nice community of folks to know right at the beginning of my time at Stanford who shared the same interest with me and who loved nature,” Xu said.

McConnell described her own relationship early on with photography as “ambivalent,” questioning having “this box in front of my face, between me and what I’m looking at,” she said.

However, that changed in July 2005 after a transformative experience in Svalbard in Norway when she was photographing a polar bear jumping between ice floes.

“It was so frustrating: my fingers were frozen, I couldn’t feel the shutter button of the camera, my lens kept fogging up, but all of a sudden there was this moment when I realized I have never been happier in my entire life than at this moment,” McConnell said. “I felt so immersed in what I was going to do, what was going to come next, and that was the moment when I lost my ambivalence.”

Accompanied by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, she was encouraged to “put her photos to work,” as many of the species she was seeing were imperiled. 

McConnell shares this lesson with her students in BIO 7N. Photography is not only about taking  strong photos “but [to] then use those photos to tell stories about the environment,” whether focused on climate change, food security, wildlife trafficking or the beauty of nature, she said.

Xu expressed admiration for McConnell’s care in teaching, saying that McConnell “was incredible at teaching us all the concepts we would need to know, right down to the basics from aperture and shutter speed and all the compositions of photography. She also told us how important it was to really tell a story with the photos that we were taking, to do it intentionally and with a lot of heart.”

Zander Galli ’26, a course assistant for BIO 7N who first met McConnell while judging a wildlife photography panel, told The Daily, “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are alums and now wildlife photographers or doing lots of important conservation work, and I think the resounding thought is that she is a life-changing person.”

McConnell will retire at the end of 2025 but continue to teach BIO 7N as an emeriti faculty.