Erica (Tradate, Italy, 1979) studied Physics at the University of Como (Università degli Studi dell’Insubria). She obtained her PhD in Physics in 2009. During her studies, she also worked in the subterranean Gran Sasso laboratory on international experiments where she collaborated in international experiments about the nature of elementary particles (like the neutrino). In 2009 she started working as a postdoc for the Institute of Reference Materials and Measurements of the Joint Research Centre (Geel, Belgium). Since 2014 she is employed as a didactic researcher under the Group Lerarenopleiding, Secundary Education at the UC Leuven-Limburg (Belgium). Within AstroSounds, Erica is developing didactic and educational packages, is sonifying stellar sounds and is invested in the project’s overall follow-up.

Music producer Frank Duchêne already worked with stars in the pop, rock and classical music worlds and is now, together with the AstroSounds team, researching how well we can differentiate between the sounds of stars in space.
Frank studied audio-visual techniques at the RITS, worked at the VRT Radio and Galaxy Studios, co-founded Hooverphonic and was producer for a plethora of artists. His love for sound, music and story-telling is the base of his career, causing his work to be heard in music producing, radio drama and podcasts. Since the founding of PXL-Music, he is a lecturer in Production Analysis and coordinates the international initiatives there. It was a conversation with Asteroseismologist Dr. Katrien Kolenberg that inspired him to develop ‘stellar music’ for students in primary and secondary education as a part of the STrOOM-project. It was again Katrien Kolenberg who invited him to be part of the AstroSounds initiative to investigate, along with the rest of the team, the connection to music. 

Renaat Frans teaches Physics, Physics Didactics and STEAM at the teacher education of  the UC Leuven-Limburg (UCLL). He is cofounder of the Expertisecentre Art of Teaching (AoT), a research division aimed at a good didactic for teachers. The AoT aims at disciplinary and interdisciplinary research: How can concepts from Arts and Sciences strengthen each other, what does good STEAM-education look like, and how can the current research be introduced in the classroom? The group is collaborating with various EU-projects like iMuSciCA (a project about music, physics and engineering aiming at STEAM-pedagogy), Quantum SpinOff (modern physics didactics and the link to high-tech applications), Ark of Inquiry (research and learning) and Rayuela (safely navigating the internet). The group runs an Educational Design Studio which develops (inter)disciplinary education tools both offline as well as online. Every year, many teachers visit the AoT for further professional schooling.
The group also works on Science Outreach like AstroSounds, where people can learn to listen to vibrating stars. Renaat Frans and the members of his group also give lectures on many national and international conferences about STEM-education. The group is partnered with ESERO Belgium.

Former partner at the Planetarium

Katrien Kolenberg is an Astronomer, STE(A)M-coordinator and manager of ESERO-Belgium (European Space Education Resource Office) and coordinator at the KU Leuven. She is professor in astrophysics at the Universities of Antwerp and Brussels. After her PhD in Astrophysics in 2002, Katrien did research at the University of Vienna and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. At each of these stops, art and music got a place in her agenda aside from astronomy. Katrien’s research focuses on the area of Stellar Astrophysics, specifically on variable stars and asteroseismology (the physics of vibrating stars). Katrien is passionate about science and art, about astronomy for development, innovative and/or artistik science communication and education globally. In this context, she made the connection between stellar vibration data and the associated sound long ago, and discovered the (convincing) power of multisensorial data-exploration. Katrien’s collaboration with Wanda Diaz Merced, who studied and used sonification, inspired her to fine-tune sonification techniques for pulsating stars. Even though stellar sounds were used extensively for science communication, it was never thoroughly investigated how powerful these sonification-methods are for data-analysis in asteroseismology (and, by extension, other areas). The AstroSounds-collaboration allows us to investigate this on larger scales, by motivating people everywhere to listen to the stars.

Jeroen is a real Limburger-Cosmopolitan. After an introduction to photography, he decided to combine his passions with an education on ‘Tourism and Recreation management’ in 2012. He completed this successfully in 2015 with a traineeship ‘voluntourism’ under the organization ‘Big Beyond’ in Uganda. In love, he also went to Hamar, Ethiopia, for a few months. After half a year in Spain as an au pair, he returned home searching for a challenge with wide diversity to satisfy his eternal hunger. Diversity was found in the UCLL with the didactics group, where he joined in 2017 and is further developing himself autodidactically. For AstroSounds, he works on the design and development of the website and the bookwidgets. Creating digital environments and images are a true creative outlet. The analysis and transformation of the radiation flux from stars to audible sound complete his contribution to the project.

Lise Verbraeken graduated as a technical physicist in 2015. During her education, she developed a detection system for neutron spectra at the Studiecentrum voor Kernenergie (SCK CEN). Meanwhile, Lise teaches experimental physics at the University of Antwerp for five years. Aside from this, she started as a didactic researcher for STE(A)M projects at the UCLL in 2021. Within AstroSounds, she combines her passion for music, as a flutist, and physics with the sonification of stellar sounds and the development of didactic packages.

Katrien worked as a PhD and postdoc researcher at the KU Leuven in the Institute of Nuclear and Radiation Physics for 10 years, where she also earned her PhD in 2001. In 2003, she was a visiting fellow at the Australian National University at Canberra. After this, as a doctoral assistant, she took an educator function at the KU Leuven Campus Kortrijk. She further specialized in physics and science didactics as a physics educator in teacher education at the Thomas More school. In 2018, she joined the didactic center of the UCLL. There, Katrien worked on Flemish and European projects focussed on physics, science and STE(A)M education. Meaningfully connecting different disciplines in interdisciplinary didactics is central to her work. Within AstroSounds, Katrien is also responsible for internal support of the project and the development of didactic and educational packages. She is also the official contact person of AstroSounds