Melanie is an accomplished speaker who has delivered countless lectures at festivals, schools and corporate events and on trips. She speaks about the aurora, fusion energy, Everest, and combining science with adventure. She is also a regular panel discussion moderator for fusion and climate events.
Melanie is represented by Northbank Talent Management. See the contact page for details and get in touch if you would like Melanie to speak at your event.
Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights
Do we really understand the northern lights? Tour operators will have us believe that we do, but there are still mysteries hidden behind the dancing curtains of light.
Interweaving the science with a background of their history, folklore and changing landscape, Aurora brings together space, place and science in magnificent style. In a journey that takes her through Scandinavia, Canada and Svalbard, culminating in a spectacular solar eclipse, Dr. Melanie Windridge delves into the Northern Lights.
Melanie has had some great feedback on this talk. People enjoy the mix of science with a personal, human story that draws them along.
Fusion Future
Fusion is the reaction that powers the stars – small particles colliding and combining produce huge amounts of energy with no greenhouse gases and no long-lived radioactive waste. This makes fusion the ultimate energy source and scientists have been trying to do it on Earth for decades. But it has so far proved elusive.
Looking at the history and the future of fusion energy, we consider why it has taken so long and how, with new technologies, we may be able to get to fusion faster.
The fusion industry is now changing very fast, and Melanie is deeply embedded in it as a director of a company that maps the fusion landscape and produces the intelligence briefing Fusion Energy Insights Quarterly. This talk can be tailored based on the interest of the client.
Summiting the Science of Everest
Mount Everest – the highest mountain on our planet – is a place where science plays a huge part in performance and survival. Many climbers don’t fully understand the challenge they are facing. Everest is not a climbing challenge (though it is huge and steep and exposed); it is a human physiology challenge, a scientific challenge.
Telling the story of her own summit attempt, with incredible photos and raw video footage, Dr Melanie Windridge investigates how advances in science and technology enable ordinary people to summit and survive the extremes.
Impossibles: the meeting of science and adventure
Melanie Windridge is a physicist, speaker, writer… with a taste for adventure.
She has travelled the world, gained a doctorate in fusion energy, appeared on TV, climbed mountains and written books. She has skied out across Arctic Svalbard to see the northern lights. She has climbed Everest to highlight the science that makes it safer. Today she leads a fusion intelligence and advisory platform, working to make fusion energy legible for investors, policymakers and innovators around the world.
Following Melanie’s journey from childhood to the present day, we find out how she has built a career around her two passions of science and adventure, and how she has come to recognise that the common theme running through all of it is the notion of achieving the “impossible.”
“We invited Dr. Melanie Windridge as the expert speaker on our trip to see the aurora borealis in the Northwest Territories of Canada, and she proved to be a great asset to the team. Dr. Windridge delivered a fantastic illustrated talk to our two groups. This was pitched with just the right combination of science and anecdote to appeal to a lay audience who had crossed the world in search of the Northern Lights. Dr Windridge presented the science of the aurora in a way that was entertaining and light. Also, she did a great job of answering the more specific and involved questions from our guests, all of whom thought she was fantastic and were clearly inspired by the stories of her intrepid travels to observe and better understand this amazing atmospheric display.”
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society