Louise, from Northern Ireland, is a solar physicist researching the trigger mechanism of solar flares. She has spent much of her career involved in space instrumentation and has had scientific leadership roles on several space instruments. She is currently co-Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Imagers on board the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft launched in 2020 to observe the Sun up close. She is working on instrumentation for the next generation of Sun-observing space missions.

She is the Director of the Physical Meteorological Observatory and World Radiation Centre in Davos, and affiliated professor at the Institute of Particle Physics and Astrophysics in ETH-Zürich in Switzerland.