The Cranberry Harvest Celebration at the farms of AD Makepeace has been going for 10 years. People gather to watch workers harvest cranberries from flooded bogs. Speaking with the workers, I learned a couple interesting facts: the cranberry plants in bogs have very high yield, but their product goes only to processed foods, not the bags of fresh cranberries you see in a grocery store; the plants on a cranberry farm might be as old as 100 years; and cranberries straight from a bog taste pretty good.

For Education Week's ongoing coverage of the Common Core curriculum in American schools, I photographed assistive technology as it's used by students at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. The technology, primarily BrailleNote notetakers, was fascinating to see in person; the devices were basically laptops without visual screens, outputting email, websites, and text documents, instead on a quickly-changing line of braille characters along the bottom edge of the machines. Some of the students had a lot of experience using the machines, but others were just learning the ins and outs of file management and gmail navigation, for instance. The article is available online for subscribers.

You can see more images from the shoot at my archive: Assistive Technology at Perkins School for the Blind

I spent a few days with Wall Street Journal reporter Thomas Catan working on a story about prescription drug addiction among US military veterans with PTSD and other injuries. We profiled two marine veterans, one of whom died a few months after we met him, who started using oxycodone as a result of injuries received during military service. Both had since turned to illegal sources for the drugs and, eventually, illegal street drugs such as MDMA and heroin. Their drug use had ravaged their lives, ultimately taking Eric's, and destroyed relationships. But the two saw no alternative due to issues with receiving alternative treatment from the VA. Neither could work due to injuries and criminal charges. It was an incredibly tough story to work on, but the resulting article is well worth a read, I think, and will hopefully do some good for others in these tough situations.

Earlier this year, I photographed Assistant Professor of Geology David Szymanski and his NASE402 Science in Environmental Policy course at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. These sorts of assignments are always tough, since the bulk of what the story was about had already happened or was scheduled to happen in Washington, DC. The class gives students the opportunity to directly advise local and national lawmakers on environmental policy using a science-based approach. I was also excited to learn that Professor Szymanski served as an adviser to Montana Senator Jon Tester, who represents where I'm from, as a Congressional Science Fellow a few years back.

I photographed a number of US military veterans who now work at MIT for MIT's News Office. We wanted to highlight the degree to which military service runs throughout the school, from maintenance workers to police to professors to administrators. The images ran in a slideshow on the front page of mit.edu for the weekend before Veterans Day 2013. The piece also complemented a renaming ceremony at MIT. Lobby 10, part of the Infinite Corridor underneath the Institute's famous dome, was renamed Memorial Lobby in honor of military veterans.
 
You can see more pictures from the series in a portrait portfolio on this site.

A little while ago I photographed Rich Nielsen for the Chronicle of Higher Education's coverage of his work. As part of his PhD at Harvard, he gathered evidence that suggests that the quality of one's professional network and career prospects are a very strong indicator of whether or not a person will turn to Islamic jihadism. Nielsen has found that clerics with poor job prospects are more likely to preach a doctrine of extremism and jihad. It was a very interesting topic to chat about while taking the portraits.