Welcome to Growing Worlds

Hello everyone and welcome to Growing Worlds! If you have landed here, you'll probably enjoy exoplanets and good stories. I'm Lorenzo.

And I'm Jenny. This is our short welcome episode, your five minute tour of what this podcast is, what you can expect and who's running around behind the scenes making it all happen.

Growing Worlds explores exoplanet science through conversations with early career researchers who are right in the middle of the action. These are the people building instruments, analyzing atmospheres, and occasionally losing sleep over a very stubborn light curve.

We bring them in, sit them down, and ask them to explain their work in plain English. No slides, no equations, just clear science, a bit of fun, and hopefully, a moment where you think, I didn't know that.

Each episode is around 30 minutes long, so that's short enough for a commute, a coffee break, or the time it takes for your computer to install that mysterious update that you did not ask for.

We begin with a short introduction, then dive into the conversation. We ask about science, but also about the person, their path, their challenges, and the reality of doing research today.

You will hear about exoplanet atmospheres, star spots, clouds, climate links, outreach projects changing access to science, and the occasional story involving some poor graduate student in a telescope at three o'clock in the morning. So, who's behind all this? Let's start with hosts.

Let me start by introducing you. Jenny, or Dr. Jennifer Millard, is an astrophysicist, a science communicator, a stand-up comic in disguise, and host of awesome astronomy. She keeps the energy high and the tangents semi under control.

Yeah, semi's right. And Lorenzo or Dr. Lorenzo Munyai is an exoplanet researcher at Cardiff University, an expert in instrument simulations and exoplanet atmospheres. He is also the brave soul who decided it was finally time we had a podcast celebrating the early career community.

And the voice you heard at the start is Kerenis Townsend, our assistant producer, who patiently turns everything we record into something that sounds intentional, coherent and technically alive.

and your best is brilliant. You are amazing.

And behind us, we also have the support of our institution and collaborators across the Exoplanet community, helping us to connect with early career researchers from all over the world.

So we created Growing World because exoplanet science is expanding faster than ever, quite frankly. You know, there's new missions, new instruments, and entire communities of researchers join in the field. But behind every paper, every data set, there is a person, there is a story, and often a very winding path that brought them into science.

That is the part you rarely hear about. The human side, the long nights of telescopes, the unexpected breakthroughs, the dabs, the perseverance, the moment of joy when finally something makes sense. These early career researchers are not only building the foundations of the next decade of exoplanet science, they are also shaping the culture of the field.

In the about section of our website we wrote that we believe that behind every exoplanet discovery lies a human story worth telling. That is really the heart of it. We want to celebrate the humans behind the research to show how science grows through curiosity, collaborations and shared stories.

So this podcast is our way of making space for those stories, pun fully intended. Science is made by people and those people deserve to be heard.

So, that's it. 5 minutes, 1 podcast and many worlds waiting to be explored.

We hope you'll join us for the episodes ahead. We have some absolutely fantastic guests lined up covering everything from cloud physics, to outreach in hospital schools, climate lessons, all the way to the secrets of star spots.

listening and welcome to Growing Worlds. Let's get started.