About the Authors

About the authors About the authors Philippe Ailleris is a Project Controller at one of the main space centers in Europe where he has worked for over 20 years. His interest in astronomy, space exploration and exobiology originated with his childhood fascination for and interest in Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), an interest which eventually led him to find work in the space industry and persists to this day. Despite the controversy surrounding UAP, he approaches the topic from a professional, rational, and scientific perspective. He has founded and currently leads the UAP Reporting Scheme Project, which he initiated under the framework of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. The project, presented at the European Planetary Science Congress 2009 in Postdam, Germany is directed at astronomers, providing a venue for reporting unexplained sightings and resource pages documenting possible explanations for those sightings. His most recent publication is “The Lure of Local SETI: Fifty years of Field Experiments”, Acta Astronautica (2010), based on his earlier presentation at UNESCO in Paris. Berna van Baarsen is associate professor at the VU University medical centre Amsterdam where she performs research on “care at the end of life”, more particularly “suffering and loneliness, dignity, euthanasia and other end-of-life decisions”, and “doctor-patient relationships”. She teaches clinical ethics to medical students and in post academic programmes. She gives lectures on the ethical and legal aspects of euthanasia, resuscitation, and organ donation. Since 2003 she is a member of the Medical Ethical Committee of the VU University medical centre in Amsterdam (METC-VUmc). In 2008 she has been appointed to the function of ethicist in one of the five Regional Euthanasia Review Committees in the Netherlands. She is the founding director of SELPH – Studies in Ethics, Life-issues, Psychology and Health. Starting 2009, she is visiting researcher at the University of Strasbourg, department European Centre for the Study and Teaching of Ethics (CEERE) and at the international Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg. Starting in 2010, she is visiting researcher at the VU University medical centre, department Psychiatry, in Amsterdam. She has written articles on various psychological and medical ethical topics and is a member of the editorial board of the Dutch Journal of Health Care and Ethics. She holds a doctorate degree in social science and has followed a post-academic education in medical and clinical ethics. Since 2007 she is active in Space research. She is the Principal Investigator of the international study on “The effects of group dynamics and loneliness on cognitive and emotional adaptation to extreme, confined 309 About the authors environments” which is executed within the Mars520 project of the Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) Moscow and the European Space Agency (ESA). Since 2008 she is member of the International Topical Team “Psychosocial and neurobehavioural aspects of human spaceflight”. Adrian Rares¸ Belu is a French Space Agency (CNES) Fellow at the Observatory of Bordeaux, France, since February 2010. In his previous career he worked in a human and social sciences academia-based consulting firm, for corporate and institutional top executive management. He has run for investiture in a European party for the 2005 elections, and served on the Scientific Council of the University of Nice between 2005 and 2007. He has worked within an industry-SME- academia consortia, for ESA extra-solar life-finding projects, and is currently interested in related fast-track detection and characterisation strategies. He is Member of the French Doctors in Science Association, as well as of EuroScience, He is a graduate of Ecole Centrale Paris, holds a doctorate degree in astronomy from the University of Nice, and has been invited at NASA Goddard. He is also a former American Nuclear Society Graduate Exchange Program Fellow. Thomas Brandstetter is a postdoctoral researcher at eikones NCCR Iconic Criticism at Basel, Switzerland since October 2009. Before, he was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He studied Philosophy in Vienna and earned his doctoral degree in Media Studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. His research focuses on the history of sciences. Selected publications are “Kr€afte messen. Die Maschine von Marly und die Kultur der Technik.” Berlin: Kadmos Verlag, 2008; “Imagining Inorganic Life: Crystalline Aliens in Science and Fiction.” Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century. Alexander C. T. Geppert. New York: Palgrave, 2010 (forth- coming); “Sentimental Hydraulics. Utopia and Technology in 18th Century France.” Philosophies of Technology. Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries. Eds. Claus Zittel, Gisela Engel, Romano Nanni, and Nicole C. Karafyllis. Leiden: Brill, 2008: pp. 495–513. Alan D. Britton is the Deputy Director of the Education for Global Citizenship Unit at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is involved in teaching and research on notions of national and global citizenship, educational policy-making, culture and identity. From 2007 to 2009 he co-ordinated a major EU-funded project on inter-cultural education as a vehicle for teachers professional develop- ment. He began his pedagogical career as an outdoor education trainer before becoming a social studies and languages teacher. He was later appointed as the first Education Officer at the newly created Scottish Parliament in 1999, before gaining the prestigious post of Stevenson Lecturer in Citizenship at the University of 310 About the authors Glasgow in 2001–2005. His most recent major publication was a major co-edited collection: Peters, M., Britton, A. and Blee, H., eds. Global Citizenship Education: Philosophy, Pedagogy and Practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008. Charles Cockell is a geomicrobiologist/astrobiologist at the Open University, in the United Kingdom. His academic interests encompass microbe-mineral inter- actions and their implications for Earth system processes and the habitability of extraterrestrial environments. He has published widely on the ethics of microbi- ology and the space environment in Space Policy, Environmental Ethics, Ethics and the Environment and other journals. He received his first degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Bristol and his PhD (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in molecular biology. He then undertook a National Research Council Associateship at the NASA Ames Research Centre in California before working at the British Antarctic Survey. He is a member of ESAs Planetary Protection and Life Sciences Working Groups. He is a Senior Editor of the journal Astrobiology. Popular science books include Impossible Extinction (CUP, 2003), which explores the tenacity of microbes on the Earth, and Space on Earth (MacMillan, 2006), which looks at the synergistic links between environmentalism and space exploration. Luca Codignola-Bo (DL Rome 1970, MA Toronto 1974, DLitt hon. Saint Marys 2003), is Head of the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe of the Italian National Research Council. He is also Professor of North American History at the University of Genoa, and Adjunct Professor at Saint Marys University of Halifax, NS, Canada. His main field of research is the Roman Catholic church in the North Atlantic area in the early modern era. He has also written on the early European expansion. His latest publications are Columbus and Other Navigators (2007); “Roman Catholic Conservatism in a New North Atlantic World, 1760–1829” (2007); “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Aboriginal Peoples in North America, 1760–1830” (2008); “The Swiss Community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the late 19th Century” (2008, with M.E. Tonizzi); Humans in Outer Space: Interdisciplinary Odysseys (2009, ed., with K.-U. Schrogl), “De Cromwell de France a brigand consomme: les catholiques de la region de lAtlantique du Nord et Napoleon (1799–1815)” (2009); “Il ruolo delle missioni religiose nella formazione dellidentit a americana” (2009); “Les missionnaires spiritains a Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (1763–1816)” (2009); and “Le prime relazioni tra il Nord America e la penisola italiana, 1750–1830. Ciò che ancora non sappiamo” (2009). David Duner is Associate Professor in History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden, since 2008. Duners research concerns seventeenth and 311 About the authors eighteenth century science, philosophy, medicine, mathematics and technology, and has resulted in numerous essays on natural history expeditions, universal languages, iatromechanics, the camera obscura, spirals, systematics, theory of matter, logical demonstrations, etc. Currently he is studying the history of mechanics and technology in the 17th and 18th century. He received his PhD in 2004 on a dissertation concerning the scientist and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, where he proposed a cognitive history of ideas. This award-winning book is now currently being translated into English, and will be entitled The World Machine. Emanuel Swedenborgs Natural Philosophy. Duner has published four monographs, edited ten books, and more then 110 articles, reports and reviews in the fields of history of science and ideas. He is editor-in-chief of Sjuttonhundratal. Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth Century Studies, co-editor of the yearbook of Swedish Linnaeus Society, and member of the editorial board of Lychnos, the annual of the Swedish History of Science Society.

Load more