Oldham 1986: school lad and keyboard player Brian Cox was invited to join rock band DARE, fronted by ex-Thin Lizzy musician Darren Wharton. DARE subsequently recorded two albums and toured the world with Jimmy Page and Gary Moore amongst others. After a 1992 Spinal Tap-style fight in a Berlin bar, DARE split and Brian left music to study Physics – or so he thought.

In 1993, a young musician named Peter Cunnah asked Brian to play keyboards on a couple of his songs. The band D:REAM subsequently went on to have many top 10 hits, including the New Labour election anthem ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, and tour with Take That (amongst others!) before finally going their separate ways in 1997. By that time, Brian was Dr Brian, having gained a first class honours degree in physics from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in High Energy Particle Physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg.

Brian is currently an Advanced Research Fellow based in Manchester and at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He has received many awards for his work in publicising science, including being elected an International Fellow of the Explorers Club in 2002, an organisation chaired by Sir Edmund Hillary, whose members include Neil Armstrong and General Chuck Yeager, and many other eminent scientists and explorers.Brian has chaired debates and given invited talks around the world.

A natural communicator with a knack of presenting science in a way that makes it both engaging and comprehensible, Brian has been in demand to present and guest on a range of TV and radio programmes, including BBC TWO's Horizon; Radio 4's In Einstein's Shadow and Einstein's Letters; BBC FOUR's Moments of Genius; BBC World and NEWS 24's Click Online.

Lucie Green is a Solar Research Fellow at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL's department of Space and Climate Physics, where she studies the onset of large scale eruptions from the Sun. She has been working in this area for seven years. During this time Lucie has also been actively involved in astronomy education, in particular, using astronomy to show the applications of physics and maths taught in the classroom in a spectacular way. Lucie contributes regularly to radio discussions, astronomy magazines and for a while co-presented the astronomy TV programme Final Frontier before she joined Stardate for its first programme last year.