Gaia People

Karen O'Flaherty

European Space Agency

Karen O'Flaherty was Information Manager in the Gaia Project Scientist's Support Team at ESTEC. Having completed her PhD in high-energy astrophysics in 1993, Karen moved to ESTEC for a Research Fellowship on the Comptel mission. From 1996 to 2000 she worked for the Hipparcos project (compiling Volume 2 of the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues, supporting the overall compilation of the catalogues, and working on Hipparcos community support projects), and on the early stages of the Gaia project. This was followed by two years in the Science Programme Communication Service as Science Editor with responsibility for the scientific content of the Science Directorate web site, before returning to work on Gaia.

Karen's interests lie primarily in the area of science communication and outreach. She is particularly interested in the exploitation of scientific data for pre-university students, and in the challenges of visualising large data sets.

She left Gaia in March 2008.

[Published: 05/11/2007 | Updated: 14/08/2008]