Panellists

Paul Franklin, VFX Supervisor on Interstellar

Paul is an English visual effects supervisor who has worked with visual effects since the 1990s. He won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects for Inception (2010), and won a second Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Interstellar (2014). Paul shared the wins with Andrew Lockley, Peter Bebb, and Chris Corbould. He has also been nominated for an Academy Award for The Dark Knight (2008). He was nominated for BAFTA Awards for Batman Begins, The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

Glyn Morgan, Head of Collections and Principal Curator at the Science Museum

At the Science Museum, Glyn has worked on several exhibitions and galleries, most recently as a curator for Versailles: Science and Splendour. He joined the museum in 2018, working as Project Curator for Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination. He has edited books and journals, designed and taught courses on science fiction at Imperial College and continues to publish academic work on a range of topics, from science fiction to graphic novels. Glyn has attended the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts for more than a decade, becoming Head Steward in 2019. Glyn also judged the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel in 2024 and 2025.

Prof Laura Nuttall - UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Professor in Gravitational Wave Astronomy

Laura obtained her PhD in gravitational waves from Cardiff University, graduating in 2013. She then moved to the USA for 4 years, and did two postdocs, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (WI) and Syracuse University (NY). She then moved back to Cardiff University in 2017 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) COFUND Fellow. In 2018 Laura moved to the University of Portsmouth as a senior lecturer and started a new gravitational wave group along with two colleagues. In 2020 she was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and became a Professor in Gravitational Wave Astronomy in 2024. Laura has been a member of the gravitational-wave community for over 16 years, having been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for this entire period and, since 2020, a member of the LISA Consortium. She is also the Portsmouth PI for the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) Collaboration. Laura's research interests involve characterising the LIGO detectors, detecting merging black holes and neutron stars in the presence of noisy data and finding optical transients to gravitational-wave events.

Prof. Olivier Shorttle, Cambridge University

Oliver Shorttle is the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy and Department of Earth Sciences.  Oliver investigates what enabled life to emerge and proliferate on Earth and how we might discover life elsewhere.

Eugénie von Tunzelmann, VFX Supervisor/Engineer on Interstellar

My name is Eugénie von Tunzelmann and I'm a London-based VFX artist and engineer. I spent over a decade working in feature film VFX, including work on Batman Begins, Hellboy II and Interstellar, a project which led me to work with Professor Kip Thorne on black hole and wormhole simulations. For the last nine years, I've been working in immersive experiences, focusing on theme park rides and, more recently, museum projects and escape rooms