Our students had the opportunity to dedicate some time to focus on writing and come together as a cohort. The retreats included mindfulness and stretching sessions, walking/running/tennis activity sessions and optional evening yoga. Our students had an excellent time and even met some friendly llamas on a chilly Yorkshire morning.
We recently had the pleasure of celebrating a significant milestone for our Cohort 3 PhD students – a fitting culmination of years of hard work and dedication. The event was held in person concurrently at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Leeds, and was a joyous occasion, featuring an engaging programme that highlighted the incredible achievements of our cohorts.
The event began with a summary of the programme outcomes and notable successes. SENSE CDT Co-Director Professor Kathy Whaler shared insights into the impactful research conducted and the contributions made by our students across various fields.
In a relaxed setting, several students took to the stage to present their research journeys. These presentations were delivered with enthusiasm and provided an opportunity for students to share their findings and experiences in an informal environment.
A key highlight was the award ceremony, where we acknowledged the exceptional accomplishments of some of our standout PhD candidates. Awards were given for Best Outreach, Best External Engagement and Best Paper, and presented by Beth Greenaway on behalf of our funder, the UK Space Agency (https://eo-cdt.org/sense-uk-space-agency-prizes-2026/).
The event was not just about recognition; it also served as a chance for students to unwind and connect with one another. Attendees enjoyed delicious refreshments, fostering a warm and festive atmosphere.
We extend our heartfelt congratulations to all our PhD students for their hard work and achievements. We look forward to seeing the remarkable contributions they will undoubtedly continue to make in the future.
Our SENSE CDT PhD student Rebecca Wilks has recently responded to the UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (UKSEDS) call for speakers for the Earth Observation panel at the National Student Space Conference 2026 (King’s College London). The UKSEDS National Student Space Conference, is the premier event for students interested in space, uniting them with academics and professionals from across the country to network, share knowledge, and discuss the challenges facing the sector.1
With SENSE funding, I moderated an Earth Observation Panel at the UKSEDS (UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) National Student Space Conference 2026 in London. The conference had over 300 attendees with a wide range of students from undergraduate to PhD level in technical disciplines from engineering to policy and medicine, all with an interest in space and keen to pursue a career in this area. Helping create a panel discussion and moderating this talk, enabled us to publicise earth observation as a career path to this highly motivated group of students, who may not have previously encountered this option.
Thank you to our funder the Natural Environment Research Council for their invaluable support.
23 – 25 June 2026 | ESA-ESRIN | Frascati, Italy
In the heart of Europe’s Earth Observation innovation hub, the European Space Research Institute located in Frascati (Italy), our SENSE CDT PhD student Anastasia Kozhevnikova has recently attended the ESA Φ-nnovation Summit. The 3-day event brought together forward-thinking researchers, bold entrepreneurs, and technology pioneers to explore the future of Earth Observation.1
Sponsored by ESA Academy Studentship, the Student Pitch Hour is a dedicated, interactive session where university students showcase their bold ideas and research on Earth Observation and emerging technologies to an audience of industry pioneers, researchers, and entrepreneurs. We are pleased to announce that following a successful selection process, Anastasia’s abstract was selected for the Pitch Hour and ultimately won the competition. Anastasia has been invited to join the ESA Φ-lab as a visiting researcher. Congratulations!
In Anastasia’s own words:
I had the opportunity to present my PhD research at the ESA Φnnovation Summit at ESA-ESRIN in Frascati last week.
It was a real honour not only to receive an ESA Academy studentship to attend the summit as one of just 10 selected students, but also to win the Pitch Hour competition. As a result, I have been invited to join Φ-lab at ESA-ESRIN in Frascati as a visiting researcher for six months in the future.
I’m incredibly grateful to SENSE CDT for the opportunities and support that have made this possible.
Thank you to our funder the Natural Environment Research Council for their invaluable support and input into Anastasia’s journey. From all of us at SENSE – congratulations! Wishing you all the very best in your future career.
Congratulations to Emma Sands who successfully defended her PhD thesis: “How does land use impact on global air quality and climate: a combined satellite and model study.”
The panel of examiners unanimously confirmed that thesis was of exceptionally high quality in both presentation and content, and a significant contribution to the filed.
A special thank you note goes out to Emma’s supervisors, Prof Ruth Doherty, Dr Fiona O’Connor, Dr Richard Pope, Dr Hugh Pumphrey and Dr Chris Wilson, and both examiners, Prof Paul Palmer and Dr Paul Griffiths.
SENSE training programme enabled Emma significantly to obtain the degree and helped her towards the next step in her career in Earth observation. She found the programme combined her interest in research. She developed new skills, established contacts and gained knowledge of non-university institutions in the space and environmental sectors. Amongst other highlights, Emma mentions:
Getting to meet experts from other institutions is very helpful for future career planning and networking. I enjoyed trying new techniques and looking at data that I wouldn’t usually get the opportunity to within my specific research area.
I was very pleased with my industry placement at the Met Office. The work I did was quite different to my regular PhD research. I also enjoyed connecting with people based at ESA during the ESRIN training and other ESA workshops/events.
SENSE would like to take this opportunity to thank our funder the Natural Environment Research Council, Emma’s CASE partner institution Met Office, SENSE wider community, and Emma’s family and friends, for their invaluable support and input into Emma’s PhD journey.
From all of us at SENSE – congratulations! Wishing you all the very best in your future career.
We are delighted to announce our third SENSE annual prize winners for Cohort 3. This year’s prizes were sponsored by the UK Space Agency. Whilst we wish we could recognise all our amazing students’ achievements, the SENSE prizes were created to recognise students who have gone above and beyond in different areas during their PhDs. Thank you to those who provided nominations, providing a challenge for the panel to select the winners.
Leam Howe – Outreach
Leam Howe‘s outreach contributions have had a lasting impact both within and beyond the geoscience community. He has played a central role in SatSchool, contributing to the development and delivery of accessible satellite education resources, serving as President in his third year, and ensuring the group’s materials achieved national reach through platforms such as the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Youth Hub via UKSA. Notably, Leam has remained actively engaged even in the final stages of his PhD, supporting continuity and mentoring newer members.
In parallel, Leam has been a key founder and driving force behind ML4GEO, a student-led seminar and training initiative bringing together researchers across geosciences to explore practical machine learning applications. His leadership helped secure funding, enabling the creation of high‑quality tutorials and the delivery of a successful cross‑disciplinary hackathon on geospatial foundation models.
Across all activities, Leam demonstrates sustained commitment, inclusive leadership, and a talent for building collaborative outreach that meaningfully supports the wider research community.
Elle Smith – External Engagement
Elle Smith‘s research exemplifies outstanding external engagement and real‑world impact. Throughout her PhD, Elle has led and sustained collaborations with a wide range of external partners, including the National Library of Scotland, Forest Research, and the White Rose Forest, ensuring her work directly informs practice, policy, and public understanding.
Elle’s research on urban trees and access to green space has combined cutting‑edge spatial analysis with clear, accessible communication for non‑academic audiences leading to two publications. Her work has been translated into interactive tools, practitioner‑focused outputs, public talks and webinars, and widely covered media pieces, supporting decision‑makers across local and regional government. You can see more of Elle’s excellent work through the first and second papers of her PhD, presenting her work at the Trees and Design Action Group / Mersey Forest Ideas Lab, her winning of an Early Career Research Prize and being covered by the Yorkshire Post, and others. Elle co-wrote a blog with colleagues at White Rose Forest (WRF) to explain how the findings of her work related specifically to Leeds, York, Wakefield and Bradford. As part of the ongoing collaboration, Elle is delivering a joint Green Streets webinar for practitioners and policy makers in the region. Through her leadership, technical expertise, and commitment to meaningful collaboration, Elle has ensured that her research delivers tangible benefits beyond academia.
Ryan Ing – Best Paper
Ryan Ing‘s award-winning paper, Minimal Impact of Late-Season Melt Events on Greenland Ice Sheet Annual Motion (published in Geophysical Research Letters), investigates the ice-dynamic response to the largest late-season surface melt event ever recorded on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Led entirely by Ryan, from conceptual development and data analysis to manuscript preparation, the research reveals that while extreme late-season melt events trigger short-lived and dramatic speed-ups in ice flow, their overall impact on annual ice discharge is minimal. Crucially, the study highlights that such events can nevertheless drive substantial increases in surface meltwater runoff, with significant implications for future ice-sheet mass loss under a warming climate.
The paper has already attracted wide academic and public attention, with citations in high-impact journals including Nature Communications, Nature Reviews, and Geophysical Research Letters, as well as coverage by phys.org. Ryan’s work represents an important contribution to understanding Greenland Ice Sheet dynamics and its future contribution to sea-level rise.
Xinyi Huang – Commendation for Best Paper
We’d also like to commend Xinyi Huang for her outstanding paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (2025), which makes a significant and original contribution to understanding mixed‑phase cloud processes. Led entirely by the nominee, the work uses innovative high‑resolution modelling and satellite observations to overturn established assumptions about how ice nucleation affects cloud reflectivity. This research has important implications for climate model representation of cloud feedbacks and exemplifies the high-quality, impactful science supported by the SENSE CDT.
Find out more about our outstanding students on the SENSE website.
We look forward to seeing the nominations for next year and once again congratulate this year’s winners and all our SENSE students for all their amazing achievements!
Congratulations to Jess who has officially completed her PhD!
PhD Title: Falling Basins: revealing hidden faults from patterns of land subsidence from water extraction using Earth Observation data
Primary Supervisor:
John Elliott
Co-supervisors:
Mark Thomas
Since completing her PhD Jess is now a Higher Earth Observation Analyst in Natural England- the government’s advisor for nature.
The role is technical and requires the skills used in her PhD. For example, she has lead a project using InSAR to measure rates and extents of slope movement in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in England. She is also involved in a project using deep learning and drone survey imagery to access seal population dynamics in Norfolk. She loves the variety of the job and it’s application to protecting England’s nature.
Huge congratulations to Jess! We’re so excited to see the incredible places her work will lead her.
We are pleased to announce we’re opening this year’s nominations for SENSE prizes all cohort 3 students are eligible, if you’re unsure what cohort your student is in please see https://eo-cdt.org/people/students-and-academics/.
The SENSE PhD prizes are designed to reward and encourage current PhD students in the NERC SENSE CDT for their research excellence, outreach skills, and commitment to working with external partners in the Space industry and beyond. The awards of £100 per prize will recognise this expertise and enable the winner to further develop their career by supporting activities such as attendance at a conference, access to field work, or relevant training.
We are now accepting nominations for the 2026 awards.
NERC SENSE CDT awards 3 prizes annually. This year’s prizes are open to SENSE students from Cohort 3. While self-nominations are not accepted, we encourage students to engage with their full supervisory team, external partners and colleagues as appropriate to make nominations. You may nominate each student for one or more of the prizes.
Best Paper Prize:
Best journal paper with a SENSE CDT PhD student author published during their PhD. Students who have completed their PhD, but submitted or published the paper while a student, are eligible. Papers must be fully published or downloadable from the journal website with a doi (i.e. a pre-print) to be eligible.
Best Outreach Prize:
Best contribution from a SENSE PhD student to outreach activities at any skill level.
Best External Engagement Prize:
Best engagement with an external company or organisation, e.g. from industry, NGO, government agency, policy maker or charity.
For further details about the prizes, the nomination process and the prize itself please email SENSE Earth Observation CDT: [email protected] and [email protected] . You can nominate students for multiple prizes.
The deadline for nominations is 17:00 on Monday 20th April 2026.
In November 2025, SENSE student Harry Davis left for a temporary new home (Figure 1) to join the British Antarctic Survey’s REWIND ice-core drilling team for three months of fieldwork in Antarctica.
The aim of this project was to recover an ice core from the southern Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet (see Figure 2). Chemical analyses of ice cores provide invaluable climate records that offer context for predicting future climate change. Notably, the ice core at REWIND is the deepest – and likely the oldest – ever recovered on the Antarctic Peninsula!
Over the past two years, my research has focused on using radio-echo sounding data in West Antarctica to extrapolate data from these deep ice cores to larger spatial scales and date bright reflectors in our dataset. This approach allows us to infer climate variability across extensive regions within some of the most vulnerable parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
In the first chapter of my work, I utilised these newly dated reflections to constrain a model that assesses the suitability of new deep ice-core drilling locations. We believe a site along the poorly-constrained Bellingshausen Sea coastline could yield an exciting new climate record. For more details, you can read an article here (EGUsphere – Assessing the potential for an ice core in the southern Antarctic Peninsula to elucidate Holocene climate history).
To complement the ice-core data at REWIND, I worked with Dr Carlos Martin (Glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey) and Andy Croy (our lead field guide) to conduct several geophysical surveys across the surrounding area (Figure 3). This was a particular highlight of mine as we traversed across waves of sastrugi with our radio-echo sounder in tow! You get a true appreciation for the vastness of the continent as you cruise towards an ever-distant horizon.
This was truly a trip of a lifetime… After looking at so many of these datasets through a screen for the last two years, it was so special to get hands on with the radar instruments and collect new data! I am so grateful for the support from SENSE and the British Antarctic Survey for this unforgettable adventure.
The visit wouldn’t be possible without the support of our funder, the Natural Environment Research Council.
Congratulations to SENSE CDT PGR Ashar Aslam who recently successfully defended his PhD thesis: “Severe weather over Southeast Asia”
Ashar joined SENSE in 2021 and completed his PhD at the University of Leeds.
Ashar is remaining at Leeds as a postdoc, where he is working on the UPSCALE project with John Marsham as his PI, in collaboration with the Met Office. He will be assessing the benefits of running global climate simulations at the kilometre-scale, with a focus on the representation of convection and its resultant upscale influence on larger-scale circulation and environmental characteristics. Ashar is now also a co-organiser of PGR Pride, an initiative run at Leeds to provide support, professional guidance, and, ultimately, community for LGBTQ+ identifying postgraduates across the university.
SENSE would like to take this opportunity to thank our funder the Natural Environment Research Council
From all of us at SENSE – congratulations Ashar! Wishing you all the very best in your future career – we look forward to hearing about your future endeavours.
