Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day and the British Interplanetary Society is marking this celebration with an online evening lecture, which can be attended online or in-person at BIS HQ – the latter will be followed by a social evening at the recently licensed BIS Bar!
Tonight’s Speaker Professor Cathryn Mitchell – Electronic & Electrical Engineering from Bath University – will introduce Space Weather, show the threats that are posed to our modern technology and discuss what is being done to protect us from the threat from a major solar storm.
Professor Cathryn Mitchell, M0IBG, has a physics degree and radio science PhD from University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Her PhD research pioneered the use of radio tomography to study the Earth’s ionosphere and won the Royal Astronomical Society Blackwell Prize in 1997.
As an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Research Fellow (2003) and Challenging Engineering Award recipient (2006) she developed new algorithms for different four dimensional tomography systems and has successfully transferred new radio science technology from academia into UK industry.
In 2010 she was the lead scientific investigator on radio science fieldwork with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, which included setting up equipment at Rothera, Halley, and remote deep field work at the Shackleton Mountains and at the US South Pole station.
Cathryn held a UK Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) Knowledge Exchange Fellowship from 2016-2021. Her work in knowledge exchange for the UK NERC brings together academia, industry and amateur radio scientists to study and understand the propagation of radio signals through our near-Earth space environment: space-weather.
Her research was recognised by the 2019 Institute of Physics Edward Appleton Medal, the 2020 Royal Astronomical Chapman Medal and the 2020 British Interplanetary Society Arthur C Clarke Space Achievement Award (Academic).
Professor Mitchell is also a radio science professor at University of Bath’s Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and is the Academic Director of the University of Bath Doctoral College.
