Around 100 km west of Copenhagen, Denmark, is a small town called Korsør, which is where I grew up. I went to a nearby city, Slagelse, to do my A-levels and proceeded to Copenhagen afterwards to qualify to study Physics at the university. I finished my A-levels in 2008 and spent two years working and studying further before starting university in 2010.
While studying, I started a student job as an explainer at the Tycho Brahe Planetarium. This was (and still is!) one of the best jobs to have as a student. You are basically paid to enthusiastically talk about your study subjects and better your communication and people skills. When I obtained my Masters degree, I started working full time here as an Outreach Officer, which involved hiring and training new explainers and project manage outreach initiatives and programmes.
All good things must come to an end, and so did my work at the Planetarium. I had decided I needed new challenges and so I set out to find what was next. It ended up being pursuing a PhD starting in 2018 in Hull, UK on dwarf galaxies with AGN characteristics. My most recent adventure is starting as a research assistant at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense where I will be doing outreach projects, teaching, and research.
I started studying physics at the University of Copenhagen in 2010. For the first three years, I was working on my bachelors degree, which involved numerous courses on astrophysics, including one on the Fundamentals of Didactics of Science and Mathematics and an observational run at the Nordic Optical Telescope. My bachelors thesis was a project titled “An investigation of quasar elemental abundances in the UV-band” with Marianne Vestergaard as supervisor and involved working with SDSS quasar spectra to measure the flux of primarily H-alpha, NV, and CI.
After the successful completion of my bachelors degree, I started the masters programme. Most courses were now elective and that meant it was packed with astrophysics. My masters thesis titled “Rare emission-line galaxies in the COSMOS field” with Johan Peter Uldall Fynbo as my supervisor and Bo Milvang-Jensen as co-supervisor. For this project, I worked with ultra deep data from the VISTA (the UltraVISTA survey) in an attempt to classify and find rare emission line galaxies from narrow-band observations.
After the successful defence of my thesis, I did not continue straight away in academia. I started working a couple of weeks after as Outreach Officer at the Tycho Brahe Planetarium, but ultimately, I decided to return once again to academia after a couple of years there. In 2018, I started a PhD project at the E.A Milne Centre in Hull, UK, where I currently am now. My supervisor is Kevin Pimbblet and I have been working on dwarf galaxies with active galactic nuclei characteristics in both observations and simulations.
While studying in Copenhagen, I worked as an explainer at the Tycho Brahe Planetarium. Initially, it involved giving guided tours in the exhibition area, talks for school children using planetarium software, and participating in various outreach events. All functions of the job involved a lot of foot work in communicating astronomy to the public. After gaining more and more experience with know how and what to communicate to different audiences, I became increasingly involved in planning and managing our outreach programme and content. By the time I was finished with my studies, I was offered a full time position as an Outreach Officer and started weeks after finishing. The new role meant moving from the floor to the office. Now, my tasks were about managing our explainer staff, develop new outreach initiatives and projects, and leading our school programme.
An important part of my job was our school programme. We successfully secured funding for building a class room and a new exhibition, which now meant that we had completely new channels of learning experiences. Our school programme also included teachers training, which we initially did in collaboration with European Space Education Resource Office (ESERO) Nordic – The European Space Agencys (ESA) primary and secondary education office. As the amount of work and involvement in Denmark on science education using astronomy increased, we alongside other space and science related entities created ESERO Denmark, which is thriving and working as well as ever.
We were involved in even more large scale projects, too. The SPARKS project was a European Council Horizon 2020 project managed by Ecsite (the European Network for Science Centres and Museums) about engaging the public about the concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Our involvement included hosting different types of science cafées and public discussions on RRI in relation to space. Furthermore, we hosted a travelling exhibition – all of which required us to coordinate with the central management as well as local actors to ensure that our workshops ran successfully and smoothly.