Members
The StA-CES Board
| Co-Directors: | Emily Finer (Modern Languages) Martin Dominik (Astronomy) |
| Treasurer: | V. Anne Smith (Biology) |
| Recruiting & Educational Matters: | Eva Stüeken (Earth Science) |
Previous board members: Christiane Helling (Founding Director), Peter Woitke, Ben Sachs, Katherine Hawley, Andrew C Cameron.
| Dr Derek Ball School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies PURE | Philosophy of mind, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of science | Derek’s work is focused on the foundations of representation. He has written on concepts and concept possession, on theoretical issues about formal semantics, and on consciousness. He also has interests in the philosophy of science, including modelling and measurement. He is the editor, with Brian Rabern, of The Science of Meaning (Oxford University Press 2018). |
| Dr Adam Bower School of International Relations PURE | International law and governance, space security, disarmament and arms control | Adam studies how international institutions shape the behaviour of states and other actors like rebel groups and transnational corporations. His current project examines the development of international norms regulating the testing, placement, and use of weapons in (and through) space. He is the Co-Director of the Centre for Global Constitutionalism. |
| Prof Andrew Cameron School of Physics & Astronomy PURE ADS | Exoplanet Transit Search, Stellar Variability | Andrew studies stellar magnetic fields and the discovery and characterisation of extrasolar planets. He is the UK Co-PI of the HARPS-North spectrograph project, analysing high-precision radial-velocity measurements and transit data to push the limits on planetary mass determination down towards the Earth-mass regime. |
| Dr Claire Cousins School of Earth & Environmental Sciences PURE | Planetary Analogue Research, Robotic Space Exploration, Geobiology | Claire uses planetary analogues on Earth to inform the surface exploration of Mars and icy moons with regard to their past and present habitability, and potential for biosignature preservation. Her main interests lie in understanding volcanically-driven environments using a combination of geochemistry, spectroscopy, and microbial genomics. |
| Dr Martin Dominik School of Physics & Astronomy PURE ADS | Exoplanet Search by Microlensing, incl. Exo-moons, Robotic Telescopes | Martin exploits the effect of gravitational bending of light for determining the demographics of planets across the Milky Way as well as of the structure of the planetary systems they form. He is moreover interested in what their diversity and abundance means for life on planet Earth and beyond. |
| Dr Emily Finer School of Modern Languages PURE | Science Fiction, History of Science, Comparative Literature, Translation, Soviet Union, Children’s Literature. | Emily studies culture on the move between the societies and languages of Russia and Eastern Europe and the English-speaking world. She is interested in early Soviet illustrated science books for children, fiction about interplanetary travel, mass produced translations of Jules Verne and HG Wells, and attempts to make the study of literature “more scientific” by categorising plots and quantifying rhyme schemes. She has contributed to BBC Radio 4’s Red Mars Series and collaborates with Science Kids who produce webinars from Kyiv, Ukraine. |
| Prof Andy Gardner School of Biology PURE | Social Evolution, Cosmological Natural Selection, Anthropic Bias | Andy works on Darwinian adaptation. Natural selection explains the appearance of design in the living world, but at what level is this design expected to manifest – gene, individual, society – and what is its function? And does Darwin’s logic extend outwith Biology, to concepts of cosmological natural selection and anthropic bias? |
| Prof Keith Horne School of Physics & Astronomy PURE ADS | Exoplanet Search by Microlensing | |
| Dr Ilona Jurkonytė School of Modern Languages PURE | Film, Media, Environmental Justice | Ilona is a film and moving image researcher and curator, currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions / UKRI Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews. Her work explores the intersections of film, media, and environmental justice. Her projects focus on relationships between environment, nuclear media archives, and communication about outer space research. |
| Dr Deborah Kent School of Mathematics and Statistics PURE | ||
| Dr Daniel M. Knight School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies PURE | History and Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of the Future, Anthropology of Crisis, Time and Temporality | Daniel works on futures, emergent ecologies, time, and the limits of cosmopolitanism. He is interested in the Anthropology of Outer Space and science fiction. He is author of The Anthropology of the Future (CUP, 2019), a collection on Orientations to the Future, and is Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. |
| Dr Ryan MacDonald PURE | ||
| Dr Sami Mikhail School of Earth & Environmental Sciences PURE | Stable Isotope Geochemistry, Experimental and Theoretical Geochemistry & Petrology, Atmosphere-formation | Sami’s research is underpinned by a strong desire to understand the origin and evolution of planetary atmospheres. This means we need to understand the nature of the volatile elements (primarily C-N-Noble gases) in the interior of planets to ascertain how they behave during accretion, differentiation, and plate-tectonic cycling. |
| Prof Tim Mulgan School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies PURE | Future of Humanity, Purpose in the Universe, Ethics of Exploration | Tim’s research covers moral philosophy, metaphysics, and political philosophy. He is interested in how the discovery of extra-terrestrial life might affect philosophical and religious views about our place in the universe, and in the constraints that respect for extra-terrestrial environments might place on human expansion into space. He is the author of Ethics for a Broken World (2011) and Purpose in the Universe (2015). |
| Dr Timothy Raub School of Earth & Environmental Sciences | Dawn of Complex Life, Major Episodes of Environmental Change, Onset of Granitic Magmatism | PURE |
| Dr Ben Sachs School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies PURE | Environmental Ethics, Climate Change, Our Responsibilities to Nonhuman Life, Exoplanet Ethics | Ben specialises in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law. His research is aimed at examining how our ethical assumptions about the value of human life and of the earth’s environment are made precarious by the possible discovery of extraterrestrial life and life-supporting environments. He is part of an RSE grant “Exoplanet Ethics“, headed up by Katherine Hawley. |
| Dr Paul Savage School of Earth & Environmental Sciences PURE | Stable Isotope Geochemistry, Meteoritics, Planetary Differentiation Processes | Paul studies the formation and evolution of rocky planets (with a focus on our own solar system), from tracing the sources and types of material involved in planetary accretion, to the subsequent differentiation of planets into silicate mantles, metallic cores, and volatile-rich atmospheres and hydrospheres. Paul’s main tools for this are the analysis of stable isotope variations in both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial samples. |
| Dr Kevin Scharp School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies PURE | Evidence and Explanation, Science and Religion, Origins of Life | Kevin is interested in how discoveries about exoplanets affect our thoughts about the meaning of human life. This includes discovering life elsewhere of course, but many other discoveries might change the Drake equation for example. He also focuses on the ethics of space exploration, which has direct effects on exoplanet science. |
| Dr Aleks Scholz School of Physics & Astronomy PURE ADS | Observations of Brown Dwarfs and Protoplanetary Disks | Aleks is studying the origin of brown dwarfs, free-floating planets, and miniature planetary systems. Observing with ground- and space-based telescopes covering all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, he explores phenomena like disk evolution, grain growth, disk-planet interaction, gas accretion, angular momentum regulation, and magnetic activity. |
| Dr V Anne Smith School of Biology PURE | Computational Biology, Complex Biological Networks, Simulation Framework for Evaluation of Algorithms | Anne studies a range of complex biological networks: from genes, to neurons, to ecosystems. She develops machine learning tools for inference about biological systems; she evaluates algorithms and develops theory with both biologically-realistic and artificial life-based simulations. She complements her computational work with experimental evolution studies in living microbes. |
| Dr Eva Stüeken School of Earth & Environmental Sciences PURE | Co-evolution of Earth and the Origin of Life, Biogeochemical Cycles, Astrobiology | Eva’s research is centred around reconstructing the environmental conditions that led to the origin and early evolution of life on Earth with implications for the habitability of other worlds. Major tools include field work in Precambrian terrains, isotope geochemistry, and simple geochemical models. |
PhD students:
| Lyan I.A. Guez School of Earth and Environmental Sciences | Astrobiology | My broad research goal is to devise a method by which to infer the physical traits and processes in action on an exoplanet from the analysis of its atmosphere. I aim to do so by using computer modelling to facilitate the task of retrieving atmospheric features from spectrographic telescope data. |
| Edward Males Department of Social Anthropology |
Previous members:
Sarah Lewin, Annelies Mortier, Sarah Rugheimer, Carolina Villarreal D’Angelo, Duncan Forgan, Lotta Purkamo, Elsie Lee, Gabriella Hodosán, Inna Bozhinova, Kirstin Hay, Ashley Watkins, Nicole Schanche, Saranga Sudarshan, Mark Fox-Powell, Boris Laurent, Bethan Gregory, Natalya Zavina-James, Katherine Hawley, Nigel Rapport, Aurora Sicilia-Aguilar, Christiane Helling, Peter Woitke, Mark Claire, Aubrey Zerkle, Thorsten Balduin, Dominic Samra, Oliver Herbort, Jan-Philip Sindel, Till Käufer, Fran Bartolic, Nicola Simonetti, Jianxun Shen, Anuj Puri, Emma Puranen, Ethan Landes, Lara Jost, Ancy Anna John, James Hitchcock, Filippo Formoso, Elliott Fogg, Katharina Bernhard, Patrick Barth, Toni Galloway, Clara Brasseur, Katy Chubb, Joanne Boden, Thomas Wilson, Elyse Allender, Arola Moreras Marti, Eleanor Mare.