Our team
It’s time to learn more about people in the background
Meet our valuable Outreach project members, who work hard to prepare this project for you. Explore their short bio and if needed contact them or follow them on social networks. Our team members come from all around the world and are highly qualified professionals in different fields and usually also amateur astronomers. You can send them a message via the Contact page too, just state for whom the message is and we make sure it will reach them.
Radim Stano
Project lead & DACH+Scotland CoordinatorRadim is an IT professional and amateur astronomer with a focus on lunar, solar and planetary photography. He holds a BSc degree in electronics. He has been a member of the GMN for 3 years operating 3 meteor cameras and he is also a member of The Astronomical Society of Edinburgh. He is passionate about science, especially astronomy, astrobiology and mathematics, technology and education and prefers cross-disciplinary projects like the GMN and the GMN Outreach project.
Denis Vida
Guarantor & Global Meteor Network founderDenis is a Meteor physics postdoctoral researcher at Western University, Canada. He leverages his formal training in computer science to apply AI and machine learning methods in his work. He is passionate about introducing AI to astronomy. He is the founder and coordinator of the Global Meteor Network, an open-source project which has over 1000 cameras worldwide and that aims to observe every accessible meteor.
Tim Cooper
South Africa Coordinator & AuthorTim Cooper has been observing meteors since 1973. He is currently Director of the Comet, Asteroid and Meteor Section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa, objects he observes from his observatory near Johannesburg, South Africa. Tim was a member of the team which located and recovered fragments of asteroid 2018 LA, only the second asteroid discovered in space before it impacted Earth on 2 June 2018.
Paul Roche
Wales CoordinatorPaul is Professor of Astronomy Education at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, and he’s involved in several STEM education programmes, mostly in the area of astronomy and planetary sciences. He is currently co-ordinating a programme to pull-together a number of previous projects under the umbrella title of ‘Deep Space to Deep Impact’, funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, which includes putting GMN cameras into schools across Wales.
Pierre de Villiers
South Africa CoordinatorPierre de Villiers is retired, lives in Hermanus, South Africa and is a keen amateur astronomer. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics and, like most amateur astronomers, loves sharing his passion with others, particularly those two generations younger than himself. He has been actively involved in outreach activities at local schools for more than 10 years and he is currently the Outreach Director of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa.
Mirjana Malarić
AuthorMirjana is an M.Sc. Electrical engineer in radiocommunications. For more than 30 years she has been working as a teacher in a vocational school in Zagreb, Croatia, teaching electronics and computer science. She’s been involved with amateur astronomy for more than 45 years, observing Moon, planets, variable stars, Sun and meteors. She’s continuously popularizing astronomy in schools and the public. She joined the Croatian Meteor Network (now GMN) in 2010 and since then she has been maintaining an RMS station in her home.
Rob Steele
Author & SpeakerRob is a retired software engineer from JPL where the last two projects he was working on the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. He’s been involved with astronomy since he was 14 when his father and he built an 8″ telescope. He’s been involved with GMN for the last two years. The last 6 months he’s been working with students to setup a local network of meteor cameras in the Frazier Park area of California.
Mary McIntyre
Author & SpeakerMary is an amateur astronomer and astronomy communicator based in Oxfordshire, UK. Mary and her husband Mark have been running four GMN meteor cameras for about six years. She was awarded the Sir Patrick Moore Prize for her outreach activities. She is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Society for Popular Astronomy council member and is a member of the BAA. She is a contributor to Sky at Night Magazine and the Yearbook of Astronomy and several other books. She is also a co-presenter of the Comet Watch radio show and an occasional panel member on the Space Oddities live panel show.
Horst Meyerdierks
AuthorHorst Meyerdierks is a retired Linux and network administrator from the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. He has been an amateur astronomer since aged 14, obtained a PhD in astronomy from the University of Bonn and then worked for a few years as application programmer for UK astronomy.