About us

She also works at Thales Alenia Space UK spacecraft manufacturers in the Spaceflight Systems department as a senior systems engineer on Mars Sample Return Missions, Nanosats, Lunar dust experiments and Planetary Protection. She is co-leading the University of Bristol CubeSat programme and is Chair of the Space Universities Network. She has also worked at NASA and the European Space Agency. She holds a ‘Best of Bristol lecturer’ and University of Bristol Education Awards.

She was then awarded an EPSRC studentship and went on to complete her PhD research on the Characterisation of electrospray properties in high vacuum at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, which she received from the University of London in 2005. Katharine then worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Electrospray research group at Queen Mary University of London until September 2008 when she was appointed as a Lecturer of Aerospace Engineering in the School of Engineering and Materials Science at Queen Mary. She took up a post as a Lecturer in Aerospace Propulsion at UoM in August 2010. In December 2013 she became a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). Katharine was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 and Reader in 2021. Katharine’s research interests are centered on space systems engineering with a particular focus on nano-satellite systems, electric propulsion, space robotics, and in situ resource utilisation.

Prior to joining MSSL, he had 22 years of industrial experience working on all aspects of the systems design lifecycle from user requirements through to integration, acceptance, and deployment. Ian is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the International Council on Systems Engineering. He holds an MSc in Systems Engineering from UCL and in 2015 gained a PGCert in Teaching and Learning in Higher and Professional Education.