Invited speakers for ALAN 2025
Sonal Asgotraa
Founder, Astrostays
Sonal Asgotraa is the Founder of Astrostays.
An electrical engineer by education, Sonal merges Astronomy and community development interventions to create a community-led astro-tourism initiative that empowers local communities in remote areas through sustainable tourism by transforming village homestays into Cultural and Astronomy Hubs and bringing economic benefits of tourism directly to lesser-known, rural areas.
Sonal was also a team member of the 2013 International Antarctic Expedition led by Polar Explorer, Sir Robert Swan, OBE
Ulrike Brandi
Lighting Designer
Director of Ulrike Brandi Licht GmbH and Brandi Institute
Hamburg, Germany
Ulrike Brandi is a lighting designer in Hamburg. She founded her office Ulrike Brandi Licht in 1986 and the Brandi Institute for Light and Design in 2013.
For over 35 years, she and her office have planned the artificial and/or daylight for more than 1,300 projects worldwide (interiors and exteriors) and collaborated with the most important architects of our time. She has designed the lighting for the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Terminal 2 and satellites at Munich Airport, Terminal 2 at Pudong International Airport, Shanghai, Rotterdam Central Station, the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Hafencity lighting master plan in Hamburg and the lighting master plan for the city of Rotterdam. Ulrike Brandi has curated exhibitions such as “The Secret of Shadows” at the German Architecture Museum and “Day Light Night” at the Istanbul Modern Museum. She is a founding member of the Transnational Lighting Detectives, Tokyo (1995) and has been a member of the Hamburg Lighting Advisory Board since 2005. She is an IALD Fellow.
In her lighting design work and lectures, she is committed to using good lighting to create beautiful, pleasant, communication-friendly and inviting spaces indoors and in public.
She is convinced that this will contribute to a more humane, fairer and more considerate society. She wants to raise awareness of the valuable resource of daylight and addresses its importance for health. Her lighting design protects the darkness in order to keep the view of the starry sky clear. Through the interplay of natural phenomena and traditional, cultural and technical knowledge, she finds solutions for more climate-friendly lighting.
Dr Hector Linares
Postdoctoral researcher
Remote sensing, modelling and measuring in light pollution projects
IEEC-ICCUB (Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya), Barcelona, Spain
Hector Linares is a young light pollution researcher with experience in remote sensing, radiative transfer models, data processing, and sky brightness instrumentation. Combining a background in Engineering (BEng Aeronautics) and Astronomy (MSc), he focused his PhD on light pollution measurement and modeling under the supervision of Eduard Masana and Salvador Ribas.
Afterwards, he has been continuously working on various light pollution projects in different topics and institutions. For instance, he worked as a postdoc with Martin Aubé, where he contributed to improving the Illumina model. He coordinated ESA’s Night-Watch project, an international effort to design a night-time satellite mission. He also collaborated as a remote sensing expert on the Earth Explorer 12, European Urban Light Explorer proposal, and he has worked on different occasions as an administrative consultant.
Nowadays, his research is focused on two different areas. First, he is creating user-friendly light pollution assessment tools to close the gap between modeling and inexperienced stakeholders. Second, he is developing methodologies for creating sky brightness maps of vast areas representing the actual and hypothesized situations.
Dr Elena Maggi
Professor at the Marine Biology and Ecology Unit –
Department of Biology
University of Pisa, Italy
Elena Maggi is a field ecologist and professor at the University of Pisa (Italy). Her research focuses on the evaluation of the effects of natural and anthropogenic factors in structuring or modifying coastal marine habitats. Since 2016, she has investigated the effects of night-time light pollution on coastal communities, and in particular on trophic networks that include primary producers such as seaweeds, seagrasses and microalgae.
She is the coordinator of the AquaPLAN project (https://aquaplan-project.eu/), funded under the Horizon Europe programme, which deals with the interactive effect between light and noise pollution in marine and freshwater habitats. Within the project, she is the leader of activities aimed at monitoring and evaluate the effect of artificial light and noise on two priority subtidal habitats: seagrass meadows and macroalgal forests in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea (Italy).
She is member of GOALANN (https://goalann.org/), an international network of the world’s leading experts in marine light pollution, whose mission is to conserve the oceans by improving knowledge and awareness of marine light pollution, its ecological and societal impacts, and management options.
Yana Yakushina
Research Fellow,
University of Ghent, Belgium
Yana Yakushina is a lawyer, researcher, and dark sky protection educator. She is actively involved in initiatives related to dark sky protection and space law.
Currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Ghent (Belgium) as part of the Horizon EU project – PLAN-B, Yana is actively shaping the legal framework for recognising light pollution as a critical environmental concern. Yana also serves as one of the scientific coordinators of the PLAN-B project. On the space law front, she serves as the Deputy Executive Director at the Space Court Foundation Inc., overseeing projects that regulate space activities globally, including the “Big Book of Space Law.”
Yana has successfully participated in international legal research projects in dark sky protection and space law, collaborating with organizations such as the EU Commission, DarkSky International, Starlight Foundation, International Astronomical Union, and UNOOSA, among others. Leading a research group within the IAU CPS Policy Hub, Yana analyzes national approaches to protecting dark and quiet skies.
Additionally, Yana is a member and advisor of various NGOs, including Dark-Sky International, Starlight Foundation, and the International Institute of Space Law (IISL). In 2023, she became a board member and co-founder of the Belgian dark sky protection organization – Living Night (IDA Chapter).
Kerem Asfuroglu
Founder of Dark Source
Wexford, Ireland
Kerem Asfuroglu is the founder of Dark Source, an award-winning lighting design studio driven by environmental values based in the UK & Ireland.
Following his graduation from Wismar University – Architectural Lighting Design MA in 2010, Kerem worked in the lighting industry for almost a decade before setting up Dark Source in 2019. He has been awarded with the title of Dark Sky Defender by the IDA for advocating the importance of darkness through design.
Some of his environmental lighting projects include the Plas Y Brenin Outdoor Centre, Presteigne Dark Sky Community, Newport Dark Sky Masterplan, Cloughjordan Ecovillage and Cumbria TAN Dark Sky Planning Policy.