I studied geology and geochemistry at university, I did a PhD in geochemistry at the university of Cambridge, and I won a podt-doc at NASA JPL as geochemist to study Martian rock. That was my "jump" into Space. After 5 years at NASA I decided to leave academia and move into science communication. I have been working as freelance space journalist and Editor since then.

Being in the media sector, and more importantly in the science and tech media sector, for a small company requires SO many multidisciplinary skills. First of all, obviously you need to know your subject - so you need to be somehow and expert in Space. However, this is not the end of it by any means. You need to understand, almost instinctually, communication. You need to know how to write, how to speak in public, how to appear on camera. So you need to have some natural talent in communication and journalist, and in general you should enjoy it (otherwise it becomes a torture). And then you need to learn a lot of multimedia skills. Because we are a small company we do all our media "in house", which means that I have learned how to edit podcasts, how to create videos, how to analyse numbers on social media, how to create captivating caption for Twitter...so it's not only science, but also communication and marketing, all together.

I am the Editor in Chief, which means that I decide the editorial strategy of the company on the long-term and on the daily basis. I plan which topics we should tackle, which news we should publish, which interviews we should push etc..I decide which cut give to an article etc. Besides this, because we are a small company, I also do interviews and write article, like a "traditional" journalist.

At the end of my PhD I really wanted to go to California (my PhD was in the UK), so applied to a bunch of post-docs all on the West coast. JPL at the time was looking for scientists to study Mars and data from Curiosity, and I could not resist to the chance to go to work at NASA and learn something new. And JPL was in California, so it ticked all the boxes