New CSH Fellows: Skyla White and Ophélie Mcintosh

The Center for Space and Habitability grows! Chosen from the 2026 CSH Fellowship call, Dr. Skyla White and Dr. Ophélie Mcintosh join our center as new CSH Fellows from the University of Cambridge and Penn State University, respectively. Welcome!

The CSH Fellowship, inspired by the success of the NASA Fellowship Programs, is a three-year post-doctoral program created in 2015 to bring young, dynamic and independent researchers to the University of Bern to conduct their own research programs. The 2026 call was focused on research in exoplanet science, planetary science, geoscience and biology, with particular focus on habitability and the search for life beyond Earth.

From the received applications, Dr. Skyla White from the University of Cambridge and Dr. Ophélie Mcintosh from Pennsylvania State University were selected and officially began their fellowship on September 01, 2026.

Dr. Skyla White finished her Physics PhD at the University of Cambridge, specializing in planetary science and prebiotic chemistry, just before joining the CSH. Her interests lie in the origin of life on Earth and beyond, focusing on research involving investigating prebiotic reaction networks and developing tools to understand how such networks evolved in aqueous systems. The goal of her work is to place better constraints on the geochemical environment and chemical pathways that may have been conducive to the first steps of life’s emergence.

Dr. Ophélie Mcintosh was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geosciences of Pennsylvania State University before joining the CSH, where she was involved in studying the asteroid Bennu sample return from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Before that, she was also involved in the NASA’s MSL and ESA’s ExoMars missions. Her research focus is on geochemistry and the study of organic molecules to understand the chemical and environmental processes that contributed to the emergence of life in the Solar System.

The CSH warmly welcomes Skyla and Ophélie! We look forward to the fascinating research you bring to our center.