The British Association of the Study of Ukraine

Patrick Harkness is Professor of Exploration Technology at the University of Glasgow.

Patrick develops exploration systems for planetary surfaces, lakes, and icefields on Earth and in space. He has led or deployed with four polar deep-field campaigns (one Arctic and three Antarctic), and holds grants and contracts to develop Lunar and Martian sampling system architectures for the UK and European Space Agencies. He is leading the campaign for a UK lunar rover to search for ice on the moon.

Patrick also works on space propulsion, building on his first experiences of rocket engineering acquired in Dnipro during the late 2010s. He is PI of the UK’s doctoral training centre in rocket propulsion and led the development of the MachLab rocket laboratory at Machrihanish Airbase. This is the only cryogenic hotfire facility in the UK academic sector.

Dr Olexandr Konovalov, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews.

Dr Olexandr Konovalov is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he is leading the Research Software Group, focused on interdisciplinary computational research and development of underpinning research software, training in scientific computing, and studies in research software aspects. Being a pure mathematician by training, he moved into this area through starting to contribute to open source mathematical software after completing PhD in the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. Olexandr is an Instructor and an Instructor Trainer for The Carpentries, a global volunteer-based organisation whose members teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide, where he also coordinates the Ukrainian Carpentries Community. He is also a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, a national UK facility to cultivate best practices of working with code and data.