Vanessa O'Brien

Vanessa O'Brien spent most of her career in banking and finance, working in New York, London and Hong Kong, before the 2008 financial crisis cost her a job she had held for years. Rather than starting straight back into finance, she decided in her forties to try mountaineering, a sport she had almost no background in, and set herself the goal of climbing the highest peak on each continent.

She summited Everest in 2012 on her second attempt after a first try was cut short by an avalanche risk, becoming in the process the fastest woman at the time to complete the Seven Summits challenge. She kept going, adding both the North and South Poles to reach what climbers call the Explorers Grand Slam, and then turned to an entirely different kind of extreme environment.

In 2020 she became the first woman to reach Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the ocean, nearly seven miles down in the Mariana Trench, travelling in a submersible built for repeated dives rather than a single record-breaking descent. That combination of highest points, both poles and the ocean's deepest trench had never been completed by a woman before.

She has continued climbing into her fifties and sixties, taken up citizenship in both the United States and Britain, and speaks regularly about starting a demanding second career later in life than convention suggests is possible.