Behind the Scenes

Join us for the fourth episode of our series and discover the journey of scientist Dr Polona Itkin from a small village in Slovenia to an expedition in the Arctic Ocean aboard the ‘Polarstern’ icebreaker ship. She speaks to Jennifer Baker from the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø about her work on snow and ice models based on data collected during her Arctic travels under the EU-funded project DEARice. 

Dr Polona Itkin finished her diploma in geography in Ljubljana and then continued her education in Finland, Russia and Germany before obtaining a PhD in Geosciences in 2014. Her passion is sea ice research, in particular how the sea ice is moving, melting and freezing. She has taken part in several research expeditions to the Arctic Ocean and, as part of the DEARice project, was part of the MOSAiC expedition in 2019/2020, where she led the sea ice and snow team on board the research icebreaker ‘Polarstern’. 

Polona’s primary interest is the role of deformed sea ice on the distribution of snow and ice growth and one of the many results of DEARice and MOSAiC will be a better representation of such processes in climate models.

Find out more:

• Link to project on CORDIS 
• Link to EU-funded project website: DEARice
• For more EU-funded research and innovation success stories

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In the fifth episode of our series, Jennifer Baker talks to Professor Dr Jason Hessels, Chief Astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) at the University of Amsterdam. He is working on Dragonite, an EU-funded project searching for new astrophysical phenomena in the huge and largely unexplored expanse of deep space. Find out more about the universe and his passion for astrophysics in this episode. 

Professor Dr Jason Hessels was born in Calgary and prior to becoming a professor at the University of Amsterdam completed his PhD in astrophysics studying radio pulsars at McGill University in Montreal. He is primarily interested in extreme astrophysical phenomena associated with neutron stars and black holes. He uses networks of large and geographically distributed radio telescopes to probe the physics of gravity, matter and electromagnetic fields. 

Find out more:

• Link to project on CORDIS 
• Link to EU-funded project website: DRAGNET
• For more EU-funded research and innovation success stories

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the final episode of this season, Jennifer Baker meets Alicia Asín, a computer engineer, CEO and co-founder of the Spanish IT company Libelium. Her work explores how the Internet of Things (IoT) can change our world, from solving parking problems in smart cities to helping reduce fertiliser and pesticide use through precision agriculture. In 2018 she was awarded a silver medal at the EU Prize for Women Innovators event in Brussels. Let’s discover more about her journey in this episode. 

Alicia Asín has a Master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Zaragoza and is a graduate of the Cambridge Judge and ESADE business schools. In October 2017, she received the “Rey Jaime I” Award from the King and Queen of Spain, the highest distinction for scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs. And in 2019 Alicia was included in the international ranking ‘top 100 most creative people in business’ by Forbes magazine.

Her company Libelium created ‘Waspmote’, a wireless, modular and open-source sensor platform for the Internet of Things that is now present in more than 120 countries worldwide. 

Find out more:

• Link to company website: Libelium 
• For more EU-funded research and innovation success stories

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.