Robert Simpson (Google)
Creator of .Astronomy in 2008. Rob completed his PhD at the University of Cardiff in 2010. He then went on to work at the University of Oxford until 2015 when he moved to Google, where he still works today as a Product Manager.
Chris Lintott (Oxford University)
Chris is Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and lead of the Zooniverse citizen science group. His research is focused on the formation of galaxies and running citizen science projects to investigate galaxy formation, discover planets and more.
Sarah Kendrew (European Space Agency)
Sarah is Instrument & Calibration Scientist with the European Space Agency, working on the MIRI instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. She is based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD. She has worked on a number of international ground- and space-based optical/IR instruments in the UK, Netherlands and Germany.
Amanda Bauer (Yerkes Observatory)
Amanda is the Deputy Director and Head of Science and Education at Yerkes Observatory which is known as the "birthplace of modern astrophysics" and houses the largest refracting telescope in the world. Previously she was the Deputy Director for Vera C Rubin Observatory Operations and was named one of the Top 5 Under 40 Researchers and Science Communicators in Australia in 2015.
Alasdair Allan (Raspberry Pi, Ltd)
Alasdair currently works at Raspberry Pi where he leads the team responsible for writing things down. When he’s not writing things down he’s thinking about machine learning, and poking at the new generation of tiny and not so tiny models. In the past he became somewhat notorious for causing one of the first big mobile privacy scandals, and a U.S. Senate Hearing. A former astronomer, he built a peer-to-peer network of autonomous, reactive telescopes; and contributed to the detection of what — at the time — was the most distant object yet discovered in the Universe
Becky Smethurst (University of Oxford)
Becky is a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. Her research is focussed on the growth of supermassive black holes and their effect on galaxies. Becky is also an enthusiastic science communicator, writing public science books and educating the masses on her popular astronomy YouTube channel Dr Becky.
Arfon Smith (GitHub)
Arfon Smith is a product manager at GitHub where he explores how AI can assist the work of software developers. Previously he founded and led the Data Science Mission Office at STScI in Baltimore. He’s also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) which is designed to bring the best bits of open source and modern technologies to academic publishing.