I've had a busy few months so far this year, and had plenty of assignments from the Chronicle of Higher Education, one of my favorite clients. The assignments have run the gamut from portraits of professors and administrators to a day in the life of a college provost to a look at campus safety 25 years after the Clery Act.

For that last one, as you can see in the first few images of this post, I photographed the University of Connecticut's police chief and a couple locations on and near the campus where attacks occurred in the past couple of years.

Below, there are a few images from a normal day in Dr. Elwood Robinson's busy schedule as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Cambridge College. I followed along as he attended meetings with administrators and professors. He's since been named Chancellor of North Carolina's Winston-Salem State University.

And at the bottom are a few images from a 20-minute portrait shoot with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's Dr. Brian Ogilvie. Those pictures accompanied an article about university hiring committees searching online for information beyond what is presented in application materials. Ogilvie is unique in that he does not search for additional information beyond what candidates submit during the hiring process.

Two summers ago, while in Russia for a meeting of the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission’s Sub-Working Group on Media, I took a little time to pop up from Saint Petersburg to Karelia. I spent a few days in Petrozavodsk, on Lake Onego, which is the jumping off point for a visit to Kizhi Pogost, a World Heritage Site on an island in the massive lake.

It's a beautiful place to walk around for an afternoon, though a bit overrun with tourists. The Church of the Transfiguration, a beautiful wooden structure topped with dozens of cupolas, was first built sometime in the early 1700s and happened to be under renovation while I was there (you can see a little piece of equipment in the picture above).

The site was a bit like one of those historical village places throughout New England and the midwest. There were people dressed in period garb doing chores and crafts typical of the area a few centuries before. Beautiful church bells rang out periodically, as you can hear in the short video I recorded below:

On the back side of the island is a small area popular with locals for swimming. It was the perfect antidote to the warm weather before getting back on a hydrofoil for the hour or so ride back to Petrozavodsk.

By the way, here are a few pictures from my short time in Saint Petersburg during that trip.

Last year, I revisited Michael Levin's labs at the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology for the Verge. Previously, for New Scientist, the focus was on Levin's work with frogs. For this piece, an interesting article by Arielle Duhaime-Ross, the focus was on Levin's research on memory in flatworms. Levin designed a mechanical apparatus for training flatworms to find food in a specific location and then cut off the heads of those worms. A few weeks later, after the flatworms regrew their heads, they were put into the apparatus again and those that contained parts of the trained worms could easily find the food again. The research has roots in 1950s-era science that was treated with substantial skepticism for years.

Be sure to click through to see the article at The Verge's site; it's a beautiful layout with historical images, some video of flatworms swimming, an article brimming with history and cutting edge science, and a few of my photos. You can also see more of the photos, available for licensing, at my PhotoShelter archive: Michael Levin - Tufts University - Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology

This week's blizzard in New England got me thinking about warmer times, and I realized I hadn't shared any pictures from my 3 days in Saint Petersburg a couple summers ago for a meeting of the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission’s Sub-Working Group on Media. It was a whirlwind in the city, filled with late-night river rides, strolls down Nevskii Prospekt and the Palace Embankment, a quick tour of the Hermitage and Peterhof, and a beautiful summer afternoon on the beach outside the Peter and Paul Fortress. The last time I was in the city was, if I remember correctly, December of 2003. It was wonderful to spend a few warm days exploring the city.

The visit ended on a sour note when, about 12 hours before my flight back to the US, pickpockets surrounded me at the Gorkovskaya metro station and stole one of my lenses from off the front of my camera. I wrote a bit about that on dvafoto. Thankfully, the police were helpful in giving me a theft report (and they were very thankful that I could speak the language!) and my insurance got me a replacement within a week. I won't let the experience spoil Saint Petersburg for me. As always, looking forward to the next trip.

As I've done periodically since childhood, I spent a couple weeks in Montana hunting deer and elk with family. The weather was bitterly cold for most of the time I was there, and we didn't get anything besides some photos and walks in the cold wind. Here are a few landscapes taken while out walking in central Montana, mostly around Cascade and Judith Basin Counties.

I've got a lot more of this sort of work from the past few years in my photoshelter archive of Montana images.