Dr Charly Feldman

Originally from the outskirts of London, I completed an MPhys in Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Manchester in 2006 and moved to Leicester for the start of my PhD in the October of that year. Under the supervision of Prof. Richard Willingale, I completed my PhD in Adaptive X-ray optics as part of the Smart X-ray Optics consortium. After obtaining my PhD in 2009, I completed a 1 year post-doc continuing my work in this subject. Since 2010 I have moved on to lobster eye optics, working on the MIXS instrument for ESA's BepiColombo (launched 2018) initially, and now on the MXT instrument for the Chinese-French mission SVOM (launch 2022), the SXI instrument on ESA’s SMILE mission (launch 2024), the WXT on the Chinese Einstein Probe mission (launch 2023) and several other missions. I am also part of the AHEAD European consortium working to improve several aspects of X-ray optics, with the goal of improving X-ray instrumentation.

My PhD was in the SXO consortium, investigating both large and small scale adaptive X-ray optics. I worked as a PDRA on the ESA BepiColombo mission, testing, analysing and qualifying the individual MPOs for both of the MIXS instruments. I was also involved in the assembly of the flight and flight spare optics. I am currently working on the SVOM mission, responsible for the design of the MXT instrument optic and ray-tracing the optic’s performance. I’m an optics scientist on the SXI instrument for SMILE and I have been testing optics components for the EP WXT instrument. I am the UoL lead consultant for the LEXT instrument for the NASA Gamow proposal and the UoL work package lead on the European AHEAD grant. All of these roles use my experience of ray-tracing, designing and testing of lobster eye X-ray telescopes using MPOs, to develop the quality and performance of these instruments. I also took part in an investigation in to the possibility of additive manufacture of X-ray optics.
My research interests are developing optics/assemblies and MPO performance improvements, X-ray instrument and telescope design, modelling and testing and instrument and science objective trade-offs.

X-ray optics and MPO development

Women in space science any of the missions I am currently working on.