Jacqueline Campbell

Jacqueline Campbell is a Schmidt Science Fellow and interdisciplinary scientist with an unconventional career path. Having been a tube train driver and then social care worker, she pursued evening classes and correspondence courses in astrophysics before completing her undergraduate degree in Earth and Ocean Science. Her PhD at UCL focused on the search for life on Mars, and for her post-doc, she studied ocean acidification using remote sensing satellites at Oxford. She then went on to work at startups in the life sciences and science entrepreneurship sector. Now, as co-founder and partner scientist at Asterisk Labs, she hopes to use her diverse range of experience to bring together scientists and engineers to work on some of the world’s most challenging problems. She is passionate about increasing public trust in science and supporting people from underrepresented backgrounds like her own into science careers. She is also obsessed with the Tour de France despite riding her own bicycle infrequently and slowly.

Mikolaj Czerkawski

Miko is a researcher specialising in AI, computer vision, signal processing and Earth observation. Before joining Asterisk Labs he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Space Agency. His research interests include data-centric analyses of large-scale Earth observation data, dataset curation, generative modelling, and restoration tasks for satellite imagery. He is a co-founder of the Major TOM community project, a platform for collaborating and reusing Earth observation datasets designed specifically for AI pipelines. He received the B.Eng. degree in electronic and electrical engineering in 2019 from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom, and the Ph.D. degree in 2023 at the same institution, specialising in applications of computer vision to Earth observation data. Miko enjoys waking up early.

Alistair Francis

Ali is a researcher working at the intersection of big data, remote sensing and planetary science. Having completed an undergraduate in physics at Oxford, he became fascinated by the technologies we use to observe the Earth and other planets. His PhD, at UCL, focused on using deep learning to map features across Earth, Mars, and the Moon, by developing models that could be used across different satellites without retraining. Now at Asterisk, Ali is keen to turn his attention to researching the climate crisis. Outside of work, Ali enjoys rock climbing, hiking, and reading dense political texts that he doesn’t really understand.