Visiting Fellows

Olayinka Fagbemiro is a Nigerian space professional, researcher, and advocate for inclusive space collaboration.

With over 19 years of experience spanning international cooperation, space education, and capacity development, her work explores how emerging space nations can shape a more equitable future in space.

At the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space, she will advance research on inclusive international space partnerships and pathways for global collaboration.

Tahani Baldwin is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Her research investigates how digital interventions, individual differences, and psychophysiology influence behavioural change within occupational settings.

Alongside her doctoral work, Tahani has a particular interest in the human dimensions of space exploration, including how people experience, interpret and adapt to extreme environments. Her master’s research investigated personality and physiological stress within a virtual Martian environment, during which she also served as Chairperson of the University of Birmingham Astronomical Society.

She later served as a Psychological Officer for Asclepios VI, a lunar analogue mission in the Swiss Alps, supporting crew wellbeing, psychological training and astronaut selection, and has since been appointed Head of Psychology for the programme.

Tahani is also passionate about communicating the human experience of exploration beyond academia. She has written about the psychology of exploration for The Psychologist, examining what experiences in Antarctica can teach us about the psychological challenges of future missions beyond Earth, and was a finalist in the University of Birmingham’s Images of Research competition for her work exploring the psychological effects of long-duration space travel.

Outside of research, Tahani can be found scuba diving off the Sussex coast (weather-dependent), reading science fiction, and hosting events for the Brighton Astronomy Club.

Laura Bullon Cassis is an SNSF Ambizione Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a Scientific Collaborator at the University of Geneva. She holds a PhD with distinction in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, an MSc in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BSc in Sociology from LSE.

Her research sits at the intersection of media and communication, science and technology studies, and political sociology. Her work has examined climate politics, political participation, social movements, and the production of knowledge and expertise. She is increasingly interested in outer space as a site from which social and political relations on Earth are being reconfigured.

Her SNSF Ambizione project, The New Stewards: Earth Observation and the Public Private Reordering of Climate Governance, examines the growing role of commercial actors in observing the Earth from space. As space infrastructures become increasingly concentrated in the hands of powerful private companies and billionaire founders, the project asks who gets to observe the planet, how those observations become authoritative knowledge, and what this means for climate governance. Following satellite data from orbit to their uses on Earth, it explores how the commercialisation of space is changing our relationship to the planet below.

Emma is in the final stages of her PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Her thesis explores the interactions between landscape, place, and people in the Old Norse-Icelandic Family Sagas.

More broadly, she is interested in environmental studies, onomastics, and cartography, especially within the North Atlantic world.

Dr Alley Marie Jordan has a PhD in Classics and is the author of Classical Taste in the Architectural World of Thomas Jefferson (Bloomsbury 2025).

She specialises in classical reception in early modern and modern architecture, with a focus on how classical philosophy influenced American national identites.

She is currently writing her second book, Heavenly Temples: Observatories and Cultural Identity in 19th-Century America. She currently lives and teaches in Scotland.

Rowena is a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Cambridge.

Her thesis "‘They’re Following our Script:’ 70 Years of Disney & Outer Space” explores the history of the Walt Disney Company’s role promoting outer space to the US public, from Disneyland’ Man in Space (1955) to Disney-Pixar’s Elio (2025).

Rowena’s research sits at the intersection of cultural history, children’s literature, media studies and the history of science.