Keynote Speaker - Suzie Imber

Suzie will discuss her research in planetary science, and some of the interesting multi-disciplinary work that happens in the sector. She will also look forward to what the future of space exploration, exploitation, and technology might look like over the next 50 years. 

Speaker Information

Suzie Imber is a Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Leicester. She specialises in understanding the impact of the Sun and the solar wind on the magnetised planets, a research area known as Space Weather. Suzie is a Co-Investigator on the X-ray spectrometer on board the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft which launched in October 2018 and will arrive at Mercury in 2025.  She will use this data to characterise the unique X-ray aurora recently discovered at Mercury.

Suzie was also the winner of the recent BBC 2 series entitled ‘Astronauts: Do You Have What it Takes?’ during which twelve candidates were put through astronaut selection with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. She endured challenges such as taking her own blood, speaking Russian while in a centrifuge at 5g and carrying out emergency procedures on the NASA undersea astronaut training facility, Aquarius. She was selected as the person Commander Hadfield would choose to have on a rocket ship alongside him.

Suzie was an England U21 lacrosse player, an elite rower, and is now a high altitude mountaineer. She has written computer code to automatically identify mountains in South America, and found hundreds of mountains that had never been identified before. She sets off annually to scale these incredibly remote, unclimbed mountains, exploring new regions of our planet and even discovering Incan ruins on the summits. She is currently a member of Edale Mountain Rescue, using her mountaineering skills to assist casualties in inaccessible regions of the Peak District.