Turbulent dissipation in space plasmas - POSTPONED

Dr Burch is an experimental space physicist investigating various aspects of the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetospheres of the Earth and Saturn and with comets. Beginning in 1996, he was P.I. of the first NASA Medium-Class Explorer mission (IMAGE), which performed pioneering global, multi-spectral imaging of plasmas populating the Earth’s magnetosphere. Also starting in 1996 and continuing until present, he is P.I. of the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES) on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, which in 2014 became the first mission to rendezvous with and orbit a comet. Since 2005, he has been P.I. for the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, which involves four large spacecraft flying in formation in the boundary layers of the Earth’s magnetosphere to perform a definitive experiment on Magnetic Reconnection, which is a process that explosively converts magnetic energy to particle energy and is responsible for magnetic storms and auroras as well as solar flares and numerous other energetic phenomena throughout the universe. 

Dr. Daniel Gershman is a Research Astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he serves on the Fast Plasma Investigation team on NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission.  His work focuses on understanding fundamental processes associated with kinetic-scale plasma physics. 

Dr. Klein's research focuses on studying fundamental plasma phenomena that govern the dynamics of systems within our heliosphere as well as more distant astrophysical bodies. He has particular interest in identifying heating and energization mechanisms in turbulent plasmas, such as the Sun's extended atmosphere known as the solar wind, as well as evaluating the effects of the departure from local thermodynamic equilibrium on nearly collisionless plasmas which are ubiquitous in space environments.

Matthew Kunz is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Professor Kunz uses analytical and numerical tools to investigate magnetic fields and multi-scale plasma dynamics in a variety of astrophysical and space systems, including molecular clouds, protostellar cores, the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters, black-hole accretion flows, protoplanetary disks, and the solar wind. He received degrees in Astronomy-Physics and Music from the University of Virginia in 2003 and a PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. From 2009 to 2011, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. Afterwards, he moved to Princeton as a NASA Einstein Fellow and a Lyman Spitzer Jr. Fellow, joining the faculty there in 2015. In 2017 he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics.

Zoltán Vörös is a researcher of the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz, Austria and of the Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences in Sopron, Hungary.  He has worked on many aspects of space plasma physics including magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence.  He has authored or co-authored  over 100 papers in scientific journals. His research was supported by several Austrian (FWF – Der Wissenschaftsfonds) and European (FP7, INTAS, INTERMAGNET, ISSI) research grants allowing him to conduct research for the Cluster, Themis, MMS, Venus-Express missions. 

Dr Ahmadi received her PhD in Physics from the University of New Hampshire in 2016. Currently, she is a research scientist in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at University of Colorado Boulder. In her research, Dr Ahmadi studies the relation between turbulence and magnetic reconnection using observational data and Particle-In-Cell simulations. She also investigates the temperature anisotropy instabilities in space plasma environments. Using both Particle-In-Cell simulations and Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission observations, we are able to study the microphysics of the space plasmas. Dr Ahmadi is also a member of Electric Field double probe instrument onboard MMS mission and provides calibrated data to scientists.

Lina Zafer Hadid is a space plasma physicist, currently working at the Laboratory of Plasma Physics /Ecole Polytechnique in France as a CNRS research scientist. Previously, she earned a BSc degree in Physics at the Lebanese University in Lebanon in 2011, and a PhD in Space plasma physics from the University of Paris-Saclay in 2016. Her main research work and interests focus on the study of the macrophysical and microphysical processes in the Solar wind and the planetary magnetospheres. Her work is mainly based on data analysis using in-situ fields and particles instruments, from various spacecraft missions, namely the ESA Cluster, NASA Themis-Artemis and ESA/ASI/NASA Cassini-Huygens.

Alex Chasapis is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is working on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and Magnetospheric MultiScale missions. He obtained his PhD from the Universite Paris-Sud in 2015, carrying out research at the Laboratory of Plasma Physics, analyzing data from ESA’s Cluster mission. He went on to work on the Magnetospheric MultiScale mission as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Delaware. His research is focused on plasma turbulence, dissipation and particle acceleration in space. He is working on analyzing in situ plasma observations in order to understand the mechanisms of turbulent dissipation and plasma energization in the heliosphere.

Dr Denise Perrone is a permanent Researcher in the Scientific Research Division at ASI (Italian Space Agency). Her graduate studies in Astrophysics and Plasmas and her PhD in Physics of Complex systems were carried out at the University of Calabria (Italy), but she was also a Visiting Doctoral Student at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (Germany). Between 2012 and 2015, Dr Perrone held two postdoctoral appointments, at the University of Calabria (Italy) and Lesia, Observatoire de Paris (France). In 2015, she got a Research Fellowship at the European Space Agency (ESA) and, then, in 2018 she got a Research Associate Position at the Imperial College London (UK). Her research interests are focused on the study of nonlinear wave-particle interactions and generation of nonlinear coherent structures in turbulent plasmas both in numerical simulations and space data analysis.

Dr Wicks received his PhD from the University of Warwick with Professors Sandra Chapman and Richard Dendy in 2009. He then moved to Imperial College London to work with Professor Tim Horbury. In 2012 Robert moved to the USA to work as an NPP Research Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2015 he took his current position at UCL and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. Dr Wicks' research focusses on solar wind turbulence and measuring the effect of the intrinsic magnetic field, expansion, and kinetic plasma physics on the properties of fluctuations that form the turbulent flow. He also develops new mission concepts and work on space instrumentation to provide measurements of plasma in space. Robert teaches space weather risk to MSc and undergraduate students and advises a number of PhD students. 

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