I am an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm where I head the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment. I am a physicist by training and received my PhD in history of science and technology. My research addresses the earth and environmental sciences from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries in a global historical perspective: aviation and atmospheric physics; oceanography and deep-sea exploration; space flight and ecology. My recent work has focused on the spaceship as a key metaphor in the late twentieth-century debate over the world’s resources and the future of humankind. The figure of Spaceship Earth reconciled sufficiency and efficiency ideals in systems ecology and in space flight. The spaceship transformed concerns about living space as a limited resource and beliefs in scientific and technological prowess into visions of closed artificial habitats or “life-support systems” on Earth and beyond. The book that came out of this project was titled Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990, and published with Pickering & Chatto, London 2015 (paperback Routledge 2016). Currently I am working on the science and the fiction of "terraforming" and changing concepts of life on Earth. From this context I will present work in Tallinn.

I also explored satellite sensing technology for the measurement of ocean temperatures and the monitoring of the Earth's climate cycles. I have published on forecasting efforts based on satellite data with the example of the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite mission for El Niño observation in the 1990s. My other recent publications concern the question how the ‘servitization’ of nature supported market-based and managerial approaches to sustainability since the 1970s. My case studies have been "stress ecology", the emergence of the concept of "resilience", and "biodiversity portfolio management".