Bayes Centre News: World Space Week: Interview with our Space Sector Business Development Lead, Kristina Tamane

 

What do you do at the Space Innovation Hub?

I lead the Space Innovation Hub but it's very much a team activity.  The Space Innovation Hub is an umbrella term for all space and satellite activities across the whole university.

It's what we are using to make it easy for our partners externally to be able to get in touch with anything space related and as part of the Space Innovation Hub we have colleagues in law, finance, geosciences, chemistry, maths, engineering, physics, and astronomy and the creative arts.

Therefore, it's basically the uniting term for all of our space and satellites adjacent or related activity and research. I'm the person who's kind of coordinating and making those links across the university and then very much promoting outwardly what we are doing in terms of space and satellites and the university. The Space Innovation Hub is our brand for us to do that.

What inspired you to get into this sector?

I'm a bit of a strange one because my degree is actually in psychology and philosophy, so it's not an area that I thought I would ever work in, but I found out about this position, and I started reading about the space sector in Scotland and how it's coming up and what people are doing.  I thought it was absolutely fascinating and I wanted to be a part of it. The University of Edinburgh had this great opportunity for me to be able to do that, and it's the best thing I have ever done. The sector is incredible. It's really fast-growing, enterprising and feels like a big family.

It's really, genuinely quite different and specifically, in Scotland, it's really well connected as well. So I moved to Scotland to be able to do this job and was brand new, having never worked in space before. It took me about six months before I became one of the old hand and very much integrated into the activity which I think shows just how welcoming and integrated the whole sector is.

How do space and satellites play an ever-increasing role in our lives?

I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding about how much we use space every day. So people who use Uber or who use Just Eat or wherever else they don't think about space being part of that. But actually, it's using GNSS signal which is something that is a satellite-based technology.

I think it's becoming better known but it's actually something we have been using for years and years and years for navigation, internet connection, security, and for military purposes as well. I think going forward space is going to become a bit more useful because the data that we get from space is largely free and can be accessed by anyone.

So that means that if you are an enthusiastic young lady, for example, if you're 14 - 15 years old, you can download space data and have a look at it and find something that nobody else has ever looked for.  It’s widely accessible. It's completely open by the Copernicus program and it gives people who have an interest in it, to be able to look at it and make sense of it for themselves, verifying what they read about and see. 

I think going forward it is going be one of the enabling things to make you aware of your individual impact so you know you can track how you are impacting climate change personally, how your travel patterns or the things you order, where you've been, how does that impact long term into the community and much more. 

It's a very good verification tool, essentially. It's not the only thing you could do obviously with space and satellites, but on an individual basis, it can be something that can show you what impact you personally have and what options you have to, you know, make the world a better place. That's what I hope, at least.

 

What skills do the next generation of space researchers need to succeed?

Of course, a large proportion of space is actually data so the work that the Bayes Centre and the data-driven innovation program does is extremely prominent and timely here because we're going to need data architects, we're going to need statisticians. We're going to need people who are going to write code. We need artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise. So all of those will become more and more essential. And even at the moment in the space sector, there is a skills gap in this area.

This skills gap is beautifully filled somewhat by the UoE investigating through, for example, through the program in the Bayes Centre, but also through the Satellite Data in Environmental Science - Centre for Doctoral Training (SENSE CDT), which is teaching PhD students to use space data, artificial intelligence and machine learning towards climate change solutions.

We are also going to need a whole host of engineers. We're going to need software developers. We're going to look at the different aspects of the satellite design and manufacturer and communication in space as well.

An essential part of space is actually provision of the surrounding services, which is one of the things that I always hear from industry. Scotland has a strong talent pipeline through our colleges and universities, but what industry also need is people who have business acumen. So we need people who are lawyers, people in business development communication experts, HR and much more. The people who will make the space world go round!

That's just one of the things that the space sector has been very good at borrowing from other sectors. I have a very good recent example. I was speaking to Skyrora, a local rocket company, who have just hired someone who used to work in the nuclear sector because what they did in the nuclear sector is directly applicable to rockets now. So we'll find that there's probably going to be a bit of a shift between different sectors – a talent and knowledge transfer if you like.

I think it's really important to remember that there are really good opportunities for people who are more creative as well.  We need graphic designers; we need artists to represent what space data means. We need to have people who can write books about what it is. We want that whole variety of people to tell the story, especially Scotland's space story because that's really great.  Some books have come out about Scotland’s part in the space race written by a collaboration of author’s including University of Edinburgh’s own Matjaz Vidmar.

That's just one of the things so we very much need a very wide range of people who genuinely are enthusiastic about space, even if they haven't got their experience in the sector, yet. Because of how close we all are, as mentioned earlier, it’s good to have someone coming in for a fresh perspective – it adds a lot of value.

 

What are some of the previous achievements at the Space Innovation Hub?

The Space Innovation Hub kind of as a brand has only arisen in the last couple of years, but the space and satellite work has been going on for many, many years in the university. I think since we've kind of come together as a team internally, that's where the strengths are really coming from. We've worked with colleagues across the whole university in every department to make sure that space becomes an integrated part of the university life and it's now one of the major themes for the university which is something that I think is a big achievement.

For example, when I got to the University of Edinburgh it was not immediately thought of in the space and satellites contexts.  Three years down the line, space and satellites and the University of Edinburgh come up in tandem often!  We've also managed to pull in a very large amount of funding to work collaboratively with our industrial partners.

We've secured this SENSE CDT that I mentioned earlier, to be able to train PhD students. That was only very recently, and that was through the support for the Space Innovation Hub. We are very involved in conversations across the UK, around the world, and across sustainability, space and climate change, and other topics.

We feature on the Space Scotland Executive Board, which is great. We've established the Scottish Space Academics Forum, which is now chaired by the University of Edinburgh, again through the activities of the Space Innovation Hub. 

From a personal kind of proud moment, I've met and spoken to the Queen and Princess Anne about what we're doing in terms of space and satellites. And actually, she was asking about the questions you were asking earlier about skills and what the future generations are going to be doing with that. And that was only last year.

To be able to get that kind of exposure has been really helpful and we've had people like Nicola Sturgeon support our activities, which is excellent.  We managed to get a really good reach out across the UK definitely to make Edinburgh known and heard about as a space player and our kind of grand plan is to be known as the Space Data capital of Europe and the Global Space University.

 

Can you explain a bit about the Space Enterprise Labs?

Space Enterprise Lab is something that Space Innovation Hub enabled to happen – it was a conversation that I started with colleagues in Space Applications Catapult. The room is in the Bayes Centre on the third floor and it's open to being booked for companies and academics to use for workshops and meetings, and it's free of charge for people to use.

The idea of the Space Enterprise Lab is to bring the space community together, but importantly, to engage with the wider communities that aren't space. So to bring in those outside players, as I was saying earlier if there's a finance company that wants to find out about space and have a meeting – Space Enterprise Lab is the place to use.

If there's a creative arts company that wants to, I don't know, get into the logo-making business in space - this is the kind of place for them to use because there’s some equipment in there which is quite helpful and we want it to be like an anchoring point for companies to think about when they're in Edinburgh. There's also one in Strathclyde at the TIC building. So if someone is not in Edinburgh but through in Glasgow, they can also get the same access.

 

Find out more about the Space Enterprise Lab and Book Here

What are some of the challenges in growing the Space Innovation Hub?

The challenges we’ve had is under-resourcing at the moment. We would ideally have a bigger team doing this important core Space Innovation Hub activity.  There is a really big opportunity at the moment. There's a lot of interest and focus on space and satellites in the UK, especially in Scotland. The Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise have both said that space is a priority area for them going forward. So I firmly believe that if we had a team working together then we could do more.

We think there are definitely more academics who could be engaged to work with the industry. There are definitely more events and activities we could do, but at the moment it's largely just me and Iain Woodhouse that are working with colleagues like Emily Lekkas and in the Bayes Centre, for example, Stuart Simmons and geosciences Craig Skeldon, Informatics and many other colleagues EI and across the whole university.

If we had more internal support and funding (given we already have some) - we would be able to work with more students, PhDs, PDRAs and academic colleagues to support their wider engagement with the sector.

How has space and satellites related research at the university created an impact?

It's multifold. I will give you 2 examples that are kind of on different spectrums. First of all, the research of the university has contributed to the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI) that's currently in the James Webb Telescope, which is the telescope that's gone the furthest into space than any other one has ever done ever, and there was developed at the University of Edinburgh. So that's one of the impacts we are going to be able to observe galaxies and universes so far away from ours that we've never been able to do because of some of the research done here at the university.

The flip side of that kind of back here on Earth and one of the projects we did was with the United Nations Environmental program, Google, and Earth Blox we used space data to look at factors that cause climate change and any kind of conflict.

We have created something called STRATA which is a portal that hopefully in the long run will allow you to predict catastrophes before they happen. But at the moment they help you to monitor what we are doing and what's happening across the world in different countries, and that's using space data and our expertise here in Edinburgh.

So we kind of make an impact across the spectrum I think and I'm sure more impact will come as a result of our work in space and satellites in the future.

 

If you would like to find out more about the Space Innovation Hub, please get in touch with Kristina.