Danish space scientist received the 2021 Amelia Earhart Fellowship

Astrophysicist Christina Toldbo from The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has been awarded the 2021 Amelia Earhart Fellowship for young female researchers in aerospace related engineering. During the past more than 30 years this Fellowship has only once before been awarded to a young Danish scientist – the last time was in 2014 when Lonnie Grove Petersen from the Danish Institute for Space Medicine received it. Christina has a MSc from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and is now a PhD-student at DTU Space. Her PhD-project is about the methods, techniques and instruments that will enable mankind to take the next steps into space, and her research is expected to contribute significantly to the development of both manned and unmanned space travel to the Moon an to the planet Mars. Christina is also a very popular lecturer for both children and grown-ups and has been working actively with dissemination of physics and space science before starting her PhD-study. She has received a Gold Medal at the international iGEM competition in biology in 2015, where she together with other students worked with genetically modifying moss so that it might grow on the planet Mars. In 2019 she was awarded the Danish ”Women in Physics Prize” for being a role model for women studying physics. Christina looks forward to using her Fellowship of 10.000 USD for studying abroad and says: ”I am both happy and proud to have been honoured with a Fellowship named after flight-pioneer Amelia Earhart. I hope that one day I myself may travel into space and also in this way contribute to new space research.”