Story | Stardust Impact

MEET STARDUST SOCIETY

Stardust Society is built through an evolving network of collaborators, researchers, creatives, and supporters connected through shared interests across research, culture, and social impact.

Marta Kaprale

Stockholm, Sweden

Stardust Impact Founder | Social Impact Storyteller I Educator

The idea for Stardust Impact grew over years of working across film, education, entrepreneurship, public sector, research, and social innovation. Across all of it, Marta kept noticing the same gap: people carried valuable knowledge and experience, but it rarely reached anyone outside their own field. A scientist's insight stayed with scientists. A policymaker's understanding stayed within policy. The people who might have related to it most never got the chance to hear it.

That gap became impossible to ignore while working on a project involving scientists. In an interview with an adaptive optics physicist, he spoke about astronomy and stars with such fascination that it became an aha moment for Marta — not just what he knew, but how he'd come to know it, and what it meant to him.

It took years before that recognition gradually found its form in Stardust Impact for creating new ways for people, ideas, and experience to connect across fields. The name Stardust reflects a worldview grounded in interconnectedness between people, fields, and lived experience.

Aquatic Researcher | Bridging Science and Society | Art & Science Collaboration

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.

Konstantinos Vaziourakis

Uppsala, Sweden

Cassandra Forrester

Toronto, Canada

Environmental Research | Bridging Cultural & Ecological Systems

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

Copenhagen, Denmark

Data Analyst | Psychology & Behaviour | Social Impact Measurement

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.