News

This month saw the annual Open University Research Excellence Awards take place, held at the MK DoubleTree Hilton Hotel at the MKDons Stadium in Milton Keynes. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the guest speaker; the astrophysicist who co-discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967.

It was a delight to have so many SPS staff nominated and shortlisted:

- Ian Wright was awarded the 50th Anniversary Prize

- Taff Morgan was awarded the prize for Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity

The OU in Scotland played host to members of the BEERS (Benefits of European Space Agency’s Exploration Roadmap in Socioeconomics) team including members of the School of Physical Sciences, Manish Patel, Vic Pearson and Martyna Hodges along with Leslie Budd from the Business School, at an event which attracted guests from across Scotland’s space sector.

The recording of Professor Stephen Lewis' talk: A Blue Planet to a Frozen Desert, Exploring the Environments of Venus, Earth and Mars, is now availalble to view online here.

We are delighted to announce that a team of researchers led by Dr Matthew Soman, Space Instrumentation Research Fellow, in the School of Physical Science's Centre for Electronic Imaging, has received £1 million from the UK Space Agency to contribute to the design of new sensors to study space weather.

Monica Grady, Professor in Planetary Sciences, spoke this summer at the Bluedot festival, held annually since 2016 at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, combining music, live science experiments, expert talks and immersive artworks. If you'd like to catch-up with her talk, the link is here: 1969 And All That.

October has been a busy month already for the School of Physical Sciences and it was great that we started off on such a positive note by celebrating the graduations of some former PhD students (across Physical Sciences and Envrionment, Earth and Ecosystems): Rhian Chapman, Frances Butcher, Jack Wright and Peter Fawdon. Some of our academics joined them at the ceremony which was held in Belfast (The Open University, Northern Ireland). Congratulations to all of our recent graduates who we know are continuing with their amazing careers near and far.

At the start of October we were delighted to welcome Dr Andrew Aldin on a visit to the School of Physical Sciences. Dr Aldrin is the Director of the Aldrin Space Institute at Florida Institute of Technology, a multidisciplinary institute created to advance commercial space development. Dr Aldrin gave a talk entitled: 'Commercial space and the ISU Center for Space Entrepreneurship' as well as meeting researchers and academics during a tour of the School.

Ben Dryer, Thomas Buggey, Oliver Hetherington, Chiaki Crews, Martyna Hodges, Martine Harvey, James Endicott and Andrew Holland represented a cross section of the School’s research and other work at the UK Space Conference 2019 at the ICC Wales in Newport from the 24th to the 26th September.

Stephen Serjeant, Professor of Astronomy, recently gave an evenning lecture as part of our 'Open University at 50' celebrations entitled 'Citizen Science and the Data Avalanche'. You can catch a recording of his talk here.

Talk abstract:

We welcomed Professor Monica Grady to the Berrill Lecture Theatre stage here at The Open University campus in Milton Keynes at the beginning of September to hear her speak about '1969 And All That'. Monica told the audience all about some of the many amazing space science events that occurred that year, not forgetting the Moon landing of course, but as we learnt on the night, that was not the only big space science event in 1969.