For more than four decades, World Extreme Medicine founder Mark Hannaford has worked where medicine, exploration and human resilience meet. Now, that experience is helping shape a new science-led expedition platform designed to create lasting value for the people and places involved.
Traverse Expeditions brings host nations, scientists, clinicians and educators together to develop long-term field programmes in some of the world’s most challenging and culturally significant environments.
Rather than viewing an expedition as a single journey with a fixed endpoint, Traverse will use each environment as a living laboratory for research, education and collaboration, exploring what remote landscapes can teach us about medicine, human adaptation, environmental resilience, wellbeing and One Health.
“The expedition journey is the vehicle. The legacy is the purpose,” said Mark. “After more than four decades of leading teams in remote, austere and high-risk environments, I’ve learned that the most valuable expeditions are remembered not for where they went, but for what they left behind.”
Local value with global relevance
Every Traverse programme will be shaped around the ambitions and priorities of its host nation, with local value placed at the centre of its development.
This approach will bring together governments, universities, researchers, educators, cultural organisations and local communities to identify the questions that matter within each location. Fieldwork can then contribute to research outputs, scientific datasets, education resources, healthcare capability, youth engagement and sustained international collaboration.
It is an approach guided by a clear principle: partner, never impose.
Research conducted in extreme environments can have relevance far beyond the expedition itself. Understanding how people, microorganisms and ecosystems respond to heat, altitude, isolation and other environmental pressures can contribute to fields including remote healthcare, environmental science, biotechnology, human performance and future space exploration.
The first Traverse programmes
Traverse launches with two initial programmes spanning desert and high-altitude environments.
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The Nabataean Traverse is a planned 650-kilometre, approximately 403-mile, cross-border research transect from Petra in Jordan to AlUla in Saudi Arabia. Following an ancient desert corridor, the multidisciplinary scientific and heritage endeavour will explore extremophiles, heat adaptation, environmental resilience, heritage science and space analogue research.
Extremophiles are microorganisms capable of surviving in conditions that would be hostile to most forms of life. Studying how these organisms function in environments shaped by extreme heat, aridity and radiation can offer insights into planetary health, biotechnology and the possibility of life surviving beyond Earth.
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The Bhutan Traverse will establish a long-term in-country partnership in the High Himalaya, exploring mountain medicine, traditional healing, wellbeing and the relationship between landscape, culture and health. The programme will place local knowledge and capability at its centre while creating opportunities for shared research, learning and international collaboration.
Future Traverse chapters are also being explored across polar, rainforest, ocean and space analogue environments.
Science across disciplines
The growing Traverse team brings together expertise from across medicine, environmental science, microbiology, ethnopharmacology, traditional knowledge and expedition leadership.
It includes Alexandre Soares Rosado, a microbial ecologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology whose work examines microbial diversity, extremophiles, environmental resilience and space microbiology.
Fabien Schultz, an ethnopharmacologist and research group leader at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine, brings expertise in traditional knowledge, biodiversity, animal self-medication and the discovery of potential therapeutic substances from the natural world.
By connecting different disciplines within the same field programmes, Traverse will create opportunities to explore questions that cannot be fully understood from a single scientific or cultural perspective.
Built on the experience of World Extreme Medicine
Traverse has been developed in partnership with World Extreme Medicine, drawing on a global community of clinicians, scientists, educators and operational leaders with experience across expedition, humanitarian, mountain, disaster, space and military medicine.
Since its foundation, WEM has trained more than 20,000 clinicians across over 40 nations, helping healthcare professionals prepare for work in remote, resource-limited and logistically complex environments.
That experience has shown how much can be learned when education and research move beyond conventional settings and into the environments where people must make decisions under genuine physical, clinical and logistical pressure.
Traverse will extend this experience into sustained field research programmes, while WEM continues to provide the education, expertise and international clinical network supporting the platform.
The partnership model is also informed by the work of WEMfund, which delivers frontline medical support and locally shaped training alongside medics in eastern Ukraine.
Every expedition as a live classroom
Education will be integrated throughout each Traverse programme, with opportunities for school link-ups, science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning, host-country youth engagement and accessible public communication.
The intention is to make scientific exploration visible beyond the expedition team, helping students and communities follow the questions being asked, understand how field research works and see where the resulting knowledge may lead.
Research findings, educational resources, films, exhibitions and shared datasets will help carry that learning beyond the field phase, creating a growing body of knowledge across successive Traverse chapters.
For Mark, this represents a natural continuation of the work that began with World Extreme Medicine: bringing people and disciplines together to explore how healthcare, science and human capability must adapt as we move into increasingly challenging environments.
“Where humanity goes, medicine must follow.”
→ Learn more about the Traverse Expedition platform and its first programmes