We are happy to welcome Karsten Bubber Outzen and Mikkel Nørup Lund, who will both take on positions as theme leads at SpaCe – Aarhus Space Centre.

Karsten Bubber Outzen, will, together with Andy Drysdale, lead the Innovation Hub theme at SpaCe - Aarhus Space Centre. Karsten, also referred to only as Bubber, has a strong background in information science, with an M.A. in Information Science and a B.A. in Economics from Aarhus University. His expertise spans UX, marketing, strategy, and communication. He has worked as a consultant for decades, run his own digital agency, and held director-level positions in digital agencies and large corporations. Currently, he holds multiple roles at Aarhus University, including Head of International Relations at ESA BIC Denmark, Business Unit Manager at Open Entrepreneurship DK, and Senior Digital Business Developer at The Kitchen, the university incubation and accelerator for entrepreneurs. He is also a member of VL-gruppe 121.

Mikkel Nørup Lund will, together with Michal Kazimierz Budzik, lead the Space Exploration theme. As an astrophysicist, Mikkel is specialising in asteroseismology and the processing of space-borne photometric data. His research combines ultra-precise photometry, ground-based spectroscopy, Bayesian inference and machine learning to unravel the interiors of Sun-like stars and sharpen our view of stellar and exoplanetary systems. He has led pipeline development and asteroseismic analyses for NASA’s Kepler, K2 and TESS missions, and now directs the Danish PLATO Office (DPO)—the hub that coordinates Aarhus’s contribution to ESA’s PLATO mission before and after launch—while also serving on the mission’s Core Science Team (PCST). Mikkel also chairs the Asteroseismology Working Group for Denmark’s proposed STEP satellite, serves as Science Coordinator of the SONG telescope network, and is Deputy Project Scientist for the Kepler and TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortia (KASC/TASC). As the newly appointed co-chair of the Space Exploration theme at the Aarhus Space Centre (SpaCe), he will help steer Denmark’s upstream engagement in current and future space missions, from instrument development to data exploitation.

Thanks to both of you for joining our centre - we are so happy to have you on board.