BIS Diary Notice

KEEN & KHAN: STARSTRUCK!

The Speakeasy @ The Voodoo Rooms, 19a West Register St, Edinburgh, EH2 2AA
9-11th August 2010
9:35-10:35 pm
Tickets: Free

Join award-winning comedian Helen Keen (her Fringe show It is Rocket Science!  launches as a Radio 4 series this year) and real-life rocket scientist Dr Sophia Khan (she’s worked for NASA and discovered THREE galaxies!) for a show about Anything And Everything In The Universe. A beginner's guide to what's Out There and how to get to it.

Helen Keen
Helen was a finalist in the 2005 Funny Women competition and the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year competition and has been nominated for the Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year award. She won the first Channel 4 New Comedy Writing Award in 2005. Since then she has written for, among others, Channel 4’s Friday Night Project and BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show and is currently developing scripts with BBC3, Channel 4 and BBC Radio 4.

Her debut solo show, It Is Rocket Science! won the Buxton Festival Fringe Award for Best Comedy Performance in 2008 and successfully toured the UK in 2009, taking in and frequently selling out comedy festivals, major music festivals, science festivals and even three performances at London's Science Museum - including a show in the famous Space Gallery beside actual space craft. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 commissioned Helen to write and appear in a comedy series based on the show, which will be recorded later this year.

Sophia Khan
Astrophysicist Dr Sophia Khan is an expert in galaxy formation and evolution. She has worked at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, the Japanese Space Agency, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, and for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Centre in the USA (where she discovered an entirely new type of galaxy). She’s currently Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Shanghai.

The two met when Helen was developing It Is Rocket Science! and first worked together when Sophia took part in a Q&A session about space science after a sell-out performance of the show at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in 2008.