Amelia Hankinson-Wake

PhD Student

Department of Space and Climate Physics

Amelia is a doctoral researcher in Planetary Science. After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Liverpool and postgraduate degree at Imperial College London, Amelia was accepted onto the London NERC DTP. Coming from a Biology and Computer Science background, her research interests aim to combine the two in the pursuit of a PhD in Astrobiology, focusing in on post-main sequence habitability of outer moons, planetary atmospheres and extreme environments, like those found at Titan. More specifically, she is investigating the short- and long-term dynamics of negative ions in its upper atmosphere as they are exposed to stellar evolution, forward modelling the subsequent complete collapse of Titan’s atmosphere, currently under heavy debate. She is achieving this by using CAPS-ELS data collated during the Cassini-Huygens mission and is supervised by a large multi-disciplinary team of renowned researchers across multiple esteemed institutions, including UCL, Birkbeck, University of Edinburgh and the Natural History Museum, London. In her spare time, Amelia enjoys reading fantasy books at an embarrassingly fast pace, skiing and snowboarding (hoping to finally visit the holy grail Canada this year) and can regularly be found in a pub in London.