5×15 on Aliens: Science from the Other Side

Prof. Lewis Dartnell is a research scientist, presenter and author based in London. His research is in the field of astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars and he now holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He has also held a STFC Science in Society Fellowship. He is very active in delivering live events at schools and science festivals, works as a scientific consultant for the media, and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. He has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work and regularly writes for newspapers and magazines. He has published three books, most recently, The Knowledge.

Dallas Campbell is an actor and writer whose curiosity and original mind have led him into a parallel career as one of TV’s freshest and most sought after presenting talents. His recent TV credits include the hugely popular BBC1 2 part series, Treasure Hunters, co-hosted with Ellie Harrison. In the Autumn of 2012, Dallas fronted his own 3 part BBC1 series, Supersized Earth. Tracing the story of how humans have transformed the world in a generation, Dallas travelled the globe visiting some of the world’s largest and most ambitious engineering projects, exploring the power of human ingenuity and the making of the modern world. On BBC Four he is a regular presenter of the Horizon Guide series – an archive show that charts the progress of scientists through 50 years of the BBC’s Horizon series, and The Drake Equation: The Search for Life – a personal investigation into the science and history behind our efforts to find life beyond the Earth.

Louisa Preston is a UK Space Agency Aurora Research Fellow, astrobiologist, planetary geologist and author based at Birkbeck, University of London. She works in environments across the Earth, where life is able to survive our planet’s most extreme conditions, using them as blueprints for possible extra-terrestrial life forms and habitats. Having worked on projects for NASA and the Canadian, European and UK Space Agencies, the only thing she enjoys more than devising ways to find life on Mars is writing about it. She has published numerous articles and academic papers, and her first book – Goldilocks and the Water Bears – is out now. She is also an avid believer in the power of science communication, having regularly appeared on radio and television programmes, such as the BBC’s The Sky at Night, and spoken about the search for life on Mars at the TED Conference in 2013.

Jim Al-Khalili is a professor of physics, author and broadcaster based at the University of Surrey. He received his PhD in nuclear physics in 1989 from Surrey before working as an SERC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL. He returned to Surrey and was awarded a five year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship in 1994 before being appointed as a permanent member of staff in 1999. He was promoted to a dual chair in both physics and in public engagement in 2005. Jim is active as a science communicator and has written a number of popular science and history of science books. He also writes regularly for national and international papers, such as theGuardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries and has presented the award-winning weekly BBC Radio 4 programme, The Life Scientific. Jim is also active in public life and a strong advocate for rationalism and secularism, and was president of the British Humanist Association between 2012 and 2015. He has been a judge on a number of prizes including the Samuel Johnson Book Prize and the Art Fund Prize. Jim is a recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday medal and the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal and has a number of honorary degrees from UK universities. He received an OBE in 2007 for ‘services to science’.