Congratulations to Dr Jonathan Eastwood

Congratulations to Dr Jonathan Eastwood from SPAT on his recent award from the UK Space Agency's International Partnership Space Programme.

Dr Jonathan Eastwood will be carrying out research on space weather with a consortium of partners including the Met Office, Airbus Defence and Space, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in the United States, the South African Space Agency (SANSA), UCL, and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, as well as Professor Enrico Biffis from the Risk Management Laboratory in Imperial’s Business School.

The project "Space Weather - the economic case" takes blue sky research into the physics of the space environment and applies it to space weather - the conditions on the Sun and in the space environment, controlled by magnetic fields and charged particles. Space weather poses a significant and increasing risk to human activity due to the growth of space-weather-sensitive technological systems and infrastructure in space, on aircraft and on the ground (since 2012 it has been included in the UK Cabinet Office National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies). 

Imperial are helping to address this challenge by bringing together researchers from across the College with expertise in space physics and scientific space missions (Jonathan leads research activities into space weather and instrumentation in the Space and Atmospheric physics group), with Professor Biffis’ research into economic risk management. Jonathan and Enrico initially made contact through Imperial’s Space Lab network which was set up in 2013.  The next Imperial Space Lab event will take place on 29^th September 2015 and details of the programme will be circulated soon.