WELCOME TO STARDUST IMPACT
MEET PEOPLE BEHIND THE STARDUST
Marta Kaprale
Stardust Impact Founder
Sweden, Stockholm
The idea for Stardust Impact grew over years of working across film, education, entrepreneurship, research and social innovation. Across these fields, I kept noticing the same gap. Valuable knowledge and experience existed within every field, yet the cultural perspectives surrounding that knowledge were often missing from the conversation. The turning point that led me to the idea for Stardust came during a collaboration with a science institute. During a series of interviews, I had a conversation with a scientist who spoke about astronomy and stars with such fascination that it became an aha moment for me. What stayed with me was how dedicated he was to his field, and how he connected his knowledge to the world around us. He created a bridge between his field and the world beyond it, and that bridge truly fascinated me. It took years for that recognition to find its form in Stardust Impact. It grew from a belief that culture is part of how society understands and responds to the world, and that cultural perspectives should have a greater role in fields such as science, technology, education, policy and innovation.
Konstantinos Vaziourakis
Aquatic Researcher | Art & Science Collaboration
Sweden, Uppsala
Konstantinos grew up next to the biggest port in Greece, in Piraeus. Before studying environmental oceanography, he spent years involved in theatre groups, that only strengthened his belief that creative expression can help people connect with complex ideas. His scientific path later brought him to Sweden, where he completed a PhD exploring how organic material breaks down across natural ecosystems and contributes to the planet’s carbon cycle. Today, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, he studies how climate change affects coastal ecosystems in the Baltic Sea.
For Konstantinos, research is only part of the story. He believes science should move beyond academia and connect with people’s everyday lives. By bringing together science and artistic expression, he explores new ways of making environmental questions understandable, relatable, and emotionally present.
Cassandra Forrester
Environmental Research | Bridging Cultural & Ecological Systems
Toronto, Canada
Cassandra’s background is in project coordination and operations, where she spent over a decade working with complex systems, information, and decision making processes. Over time, this led her toward environmental conservation, earth systems, and the ecological and social histories connected to land and water. Geographic Information Systems became a natural extension of this interest as
a way to make environmental and spatial knowledge visible and useful in practice.
What draws her to Stardust Impact is the connection between data, lived experience, and storytelling. She shares the belief that meaningful change begins when different forms of knowledge are brought together. She brings a systems oriented perspective together with a growing technical foundation in environmental science, and a strong curiosity about how knowledge and experience connect across fields.
Emma Brice
Data Analyst | Psychology & Behaviour | Social Impact Measurement
France - Denmark
Emma has a background in psychology and data analytics and is originally from France. She is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her background in psychology gives her another way of looking at data, with an interest in understanding people, their behaviour, and how information can be communicated in a way that people can actually use. She enjoys the analytical side of the work, but also the more creative side, especially finding different ways to visualise information and make data easier to understand. For Emma, data is about bringing meaning to information. At Stardust Impact, she is particularly interested in questions around how people change their attitudes and behaviour. Her psychology background makes her especially curious about what happens when people’s knowledge or perspectives change, and how this can be measured through data.