McGovern spent years, including during college, traversing more than 100 countries with National Geographic and photographing everything from black bears in Hanover to the nearly extinct Asiatic lions in Gir National Park in India. His videos about field life have accumulated 1.4 million Instagram followers. He recently launched 1000 Animals, a field journal project to document the planet’s most iconic creatures.
McGovern has challenged himself to capture 1,000 species in the wild, from Antarctica to the Amazon. “It was a moment of realizing: ‘Why don’t we go for it?’ ” he says. “Let’s do the whole planet.” McGovern launched a YouTube channel and aims to inspire the next generation to engage with wildlife and the environment. “I hope young people will watch it and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can relate to what I’m seeing on camera.’ ” The multiyear project currently features entries on humpback whales and blacktip reef sharks, both found in French Polynesia.
An environmental studies major and Stamps scholar, McGovern studied biodiversity at Oxford, earned an M.B.A. from Stanford this year, and has worked for YouTuber MrBeast and as a sustainability analyst at McKinsey & Co. consultants. He touts the College’s interdisciplinary emphasis as fundamental to his career. A number of alumni are on the team, including Sienna Henderson ’23, who admires McGovern’s willingness to pursue ideas that “sound a little crazy.” “Days range from thinking through long-term strategy,” she says, “to figuring out how we’re going to find and photograph a bird-of-paradise in Papua New Guinea.”
