CHAIR
Charles Cockell is Chair of the Board of the Earth and Space Foundation. He founded the Earth and Space Foundation in 1994. Prof. Cockell has led or participated in many expeditions around the world with different organizations, including the British Antarctic Survey, NASA, the U.S. Antarctic Program, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1990, he led the first western expedition to visit post-communist Mongolia. His team covered 2,500 kilometers across the steppes and mountains of the country. In 1993, he led an expedition to Indonesia, where he piloted an insect collecting ultra-light aircraft above the rainforest canopy. He has undertaken biological work with the NASA Haughton-Mars Project, a NASA Mars analog project in the Canadian High Arctic. Prof. Cockell received his first degree in Biochemistry from Bristol University and his doctorate in Molecular Biology from Oxford University. He was a National Academy of Sciences Associate at the NASA Ames Research Center in California for two years, and spent two years as a Visiting Scientist at Stanford University and the University of Arizona. He then spent four years working at the British Antarctic Survey, before working as Professor of Geomicrobiology at the Open University and most recently as Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh. He is an alumnus of the International Space University’s 1991 summer session, where he co-authored a human Mars mission design project. He is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Explorers Club of New York. He was a 1993 Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and recipient of the 1993 Pol Roger Award. His academic interests encompass life in extreme environments and the exploration and settlement of space, subjects on which he has published a large number of papers and books. He is also project lead for Life Beyond, a project he established to involve prisoners in the design of settlements beyond Earth in collaboration with the Scottish Prison Service and the Prisoners’ Education Trust.