Space: The final frontier Abbie MacKinnon, Keri Elmsly, Carlos Frenk, Catherine Heymans and Stephanie Flanders (chair)

Keri Elmsly is a global curator based in London and Los Angeles. Her roots in underground culture led to a collaborative and expansive practice ranging from artist development and the world's largest immersive destinations to designing and curating museums. In 2025, Keri founded PACT (Planetary Art Culture Technology), a collective of international artists, curators, and inventors. PACT exists to amplify artists' unique utility as engines for imagination, agency and change. She recently served as Executive Director of Programming at ACMI, Australia's museum of screen culture; Senior Vice President of Sphere Studios (Sphere, Las Vegas); and Chief Creative Officer at Second Story. As a commissioner and executive producer, Keri works with leading artists in digital, contemporary, and immersive practices, including Ayoung Kim, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Katie Paterson, Liam Young, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Quayola, Serwah Attafuah, United Visual Artists, Universal Everything and many more. 

Carlos Frenk is Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics, founder, in 2002, of Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, of which he was Director until 2020. He is one of the originators of the 'Cold dark matter' theory of the formation of cosmic structures, specialising on supercomputer simulations and semi-analytic models of the evolution of the universe. He has published over 600 scientific refereed papers which have been cited over 150,000 times. Carlos was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and has received numerous prizes, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Rumford medal of the Royal Society, the Dirac medal of the Institute of Physics, the Max Born medal of the German Physics Society, the Gruber Cosmology prize, the Hoyle medal, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the Oort Professorship, etc. He was awarded a CBE in the 2017 Queen’s birthday honours list. Carlos is currently a member of the Royal Society Council, chair of the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee and of the ERC Advanced Investigator Grants Panel 9. He has received over £65 million in research grants, including two European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator grants. He played a major role in obtaining external funding for two research buildings at Durham, one a landmark building designed by Daniel Libeskind which was opened in March 2017. He features regularly on radio and TV.

Catherine Heymans is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh and the Director of the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She is a world-leading expert on the physics of the so-called dark universe. Catherine’s research seeks to shed light on the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter – elusive entities that together account for more than 95 per cent of the universe. Catherine regularly features as a space, physics and astronomy expert on BBC radio and television, and her first popular science book, How to Design a Universe: the Science of Real and Virtual Worlds, will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2026.  All net royalties will go to the Royal Observatory Trust, supporting astronomy youth projects across Scotland.

Stephanie Flanders is head of Economics and Government at Bloomberg News, overseeing the research and journalism of 250 economists and reporters worldwide and hosting the weekly podcast, Trumponomics. She was previously Chief Market Strategist for Europe at J P Morgan Asset Management in London (2013-17) and BBC Economics Editor (2002-2013). She was Senior Advisor and speech writer to US Treasury Secretary Lawrence H Summers (1997-2001). She has also been a reporter at the New York Times, the Principal Editor of the 2002 Human Development Report, an editorial-writer and economics columnist at the Financial Times, and an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School. In 2016-17 Stephanie chaired the Inclusive Growth Commission for the Royal Society of Arts. She is the Chair of the non-profit arts company, Artichoke, an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Society of Professional Economists.

Abbie MacKinnon is Curator of Space Technology at the Science Museum. Prior to this, she worked developing temporary exhibitions and as an Assistant Curator for Technologies and Engineering, where she discovered her love of all things space. Abbie was the Lead Curator on the new Space gallery at the Science Museum in London. She is always on the hunt for new objects to add to the Space Technology collection. She is passionate about using material culture to tell new, surprising and engaging stories for museum visitors and hopefully helping to inspire the next generation of space explorers.