Dr Erin Macdonald
PhD Physics and Astronomy, 2012
Erin Macdonald has a PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Glasgow and is a writer, speaker, producer, and science advisor, most notably the official science advisor for the Star Trek franchise and the first woman to hold this role since the franchise began in 1966.
She has also voiced her fictional counterpart Lt. Cmdr. Erin Macdonald in Star Trek: Prodigy and the video game Star Trek Online. As a writer, she wrote and narrated the Audible Original bestseller “The Science of Sci-Fi”, she wrote the baby board book “Star Trek: My First Book of Space”, and is a major contributor to the table-top role-playing game “Star Trek: Adventures”.Her screenwriting has also won numerous awards for science fiction as well as historical drama.
She is the founder and CEO of Spacetime Productions, a production company dedicated to lifting marginalized voices and providing opportunity in traditionally under-represented genre stories and her recent short film, Long Away, is on the film festival circuit. Recently she was a part of the Star Trek team who received the institutional Peabody award, and in 2025 she was the Study UK Alumni Award winner for Culture and Creativity USA.
