Karen Aplin
Karen Aplin is a British scientist who studies the Earth's atmosphere and space. She is a professor at the University of Bristol. Her work brings together space science and atmospheric science, focusing on how electricity affects planetary atmospheres. She runs the Snowdon space-weather observatory.
Education and career: She attended The High School, Gloucester, and earned a BSc in Natural Sciences from Durham University in 1997, where she was president of the Durham University Orchestral Society. She earned a PhD in experimental atmospheric physics from the University of Reading in 2000. She worked at the University of Hertfordshire and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on space and atmospheric instruments, then became head of the physics laboratories at Oxford University in 2009. She moved to Bristol in 2018.
Research: Aplin develops and uses new instruments to study electrical effects in space and the atmosphere. She maintains the Snowdon space-weather observatory. She has done experiments on ions created by cosmic rays and argues they are too small to help clouds form, so cosmic rays are unlikely to have a strong effect on global cloud cover. Her work also explores how volcanoes, lightning and radon gas are connected, and studies how ultraviolet light and cosmic rays affect Neptune’s atmosphere. She has even looked at how climate and weather have influenced Western orchestral composers.
Roles: She received the 2021 James Dungey Lectureship from the Royal Astronomical Society. She was a visiting professor at the University of Bath in 2019. Since 2015 she has been editor of the Journal of Electrostatics, and since 2009 editor of the open-access History of Geo- and Space Sciences.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:09 (CET).