91TV

Professor Heather Cegla is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her research aims to enable the future confirmation of Earth analogues and improve our understanding of planetary migration and evolution by disentangling stellar and planetary signatures. To do so, she studies stellar variability through a combination of theoretical modelling and observation: employing state-of-the-art 3D simulations to investigate the underlying physics, and using transiting planets to spatially resolve stellar surfaces and determine star–planet orbital alignments

Heather completed her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 2014, focusing on mitigating granulation noise in the confirmation of low-mass exoplanets using 3D magnetohydrodynamical simulations. She subsequently held a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship at QUB and a CHEOPS Research Fellowship at the University of Geneva. She previously studied Physics, with an emphasis in Astronomy and a minor in Mathematics, at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Annelies is an Associate Professor in astronomy and a UKRI Future Leader Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She previously did her PhD in Porto, a postdoc in St Andrews and a Kavli Fellowship in Cambridge. She is an observational astronomer playing with stars and exoplanets. She works on the detection and characterisation of (small) exoplanets, currently mostly using the HARPS-N spectrograph. She studies the link between planetary and stellar parameters, focusing mainly on chemical composition. Annelies also studies the Sun-as-a-star with multiple instruments to understand the processes behind stellar variability and their effect on radial velocity.

Clark is leading the development of a next generation EPRV 'Earth-twin' survey facility, HARVY, at ETH-Zürich. This project aims to develop a system that can be rolled out at scale to generate a network of EPRV spectrographs globally, increasing the quantity and accessibility of precise radial velocity data. Previously, Clark was a Post-doc at the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the realisation of the HARPS3 instrument for the Terra Hunting Experiment. Clark completed his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, in the study of Spectrographs for Exoplanetary Science.

Francesco Alfonso Pepe obtained his degree in physics (1992) and his PhD (1995) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. There he specialised in the construction of state-of-the-art astronomical instruments. He has been a full professor at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) since 2019.

He joined UNIGE's Department of Astronomy in 1998, under the impetus of Michel Mayor, to design a new spectrograph for the search for exoplanets. It is this instrument, HARPS, that has enabled Michel Mayor and his team to maintain pole position in the race to detect Earth-like planets. After having been the scientist in charge of the HARPS instrument, Francesco Pepe has developed the Department of Astronomy's instrumentation group, which obtained a worldwide reputation for building many other instruments that are among the most precise in the world. He heads the consortia that are essential to the design of instruments that require large international collaboration. This is the case of the ESPRESSO spectrograph, now installed at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

Yuk Shan (Shan) Cheng is a postdoc in the Ultrafast Optics Group at Heriot-Watt University, where her research focuses on developing laser frequency combs for astronomical spectrograph calibration. She has contributed to the ANDES astrocomb programme for the Extremely Large Telescope since the start of her PhD. Shan now leads the lab development of a pilot astrocomb architecture for ANDES and serves as deputy manager of its astrocomb work package. Since 2023, she has worked on the installation and commissioning of astrocomb at the Southern African Large Telescope, taking the technology from a lab environment to in-field operation.