People
From CICART
Research Scientist, Space Science Center of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire. Dr. Bessho received his Ph.D. in Science from Nagoya University, Japan, in 2001. His thesis was "Production of Ultrarelativistic Electrons by an Oblique Magnetosonic Shock Wave", which was a study of electron acceleration by particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. His research interests are in a method of PIC simulation, particle acceleration in a shock wave, nonlinear wave theory, magnetic reconnection, and space plasmas.
Paul Professor, Space Science Center of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space and Department of Physics, University of New Hampshire. Professor Bhattacharjee received his Ph.D. at Princeton University (1981) in theoretical plasma physics from the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He and his students and postdoctoral colleagues have authored over 200 publications with broad applications to laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas. At the University of Iowa, he has received the James Van Allen Natural Sciences Fellowship (1996) and the Faculty Scholar (1997-2000) award. He has served as Associate Editor of the Geophysical Research Letters and the Physics of Plasmas, as Chair of the Topical Group in Plasma Astrophysics of the American Physical Society, and on various prize and fellowship committees. He is presently Vice-Chair of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society and Senior Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1993, and a Fellow of the American Association of Advancement of Science in 2000. Professor Bhattacharjee's research interests include: magnetohydrodynamics, magnetic reconnection, turbulence and singularity formation, kinetic theory, free-electron lasers, and dusty plasmas.
Professor Chandran received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997. His research is in the areas of theoretical plasma physics and theoretical astrophysics, particularly problems at the interface between these two fields. His main interests are plasma turbulence, the role of turbulence in the solar corona and other astrophysical settings, and the evolution of baryonic matter in clusters of galaxies. He has also worked on cosmic-ray propagation, particle acceleration at shocks, and the origin of astrophysical magnetic fields. His research program is supported by grants from NASA, NSF, and DOE, and offers research opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars.
Research Scientist, Physics Department and the Space Science Center of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire.
Li-Jen Chen received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington with a theoretical dissertation on electrostatic solitary waves in collisionless plasmas. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Iowa on the subjects of magnetospheric substorms, electrostatic solitary waves, and dispersive Alfven waves and their interaction with auroral electrons. She joined the Space Plasma Theory Group in December, 2005, and began to study magnetic reconnection. Her main interest in magnetic reconnection includes particle acceleration and structures of the diffusion region that affect the energy conversion rate and energy partition. In addition to reconnection, her current research interests include dynamics of electrostatic structures and how they influence plasma bulk properties at current layers, propagation of dispersive Alfven waves and field line resonances. She takes an approach that integrates theories, plasma simulations and laboratory experiments with space observations to address un-answered questions in her research areas of interest.
Kai Germaschewski received his Ph.D. in Computational Plasma Physics from the University of Duesseldorf, Germany in 2001. His advisor was Rainer Grauer and his thesis is titled "Pulse propagation in media with anistroptic dispersion". After working one year as a post-doc at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany he joined Amitava Bhattacharjee's Center for Magnetic Reconnection Studies (CMRS) at the University of Iowa in 2002, working on Hall-MHD simulation codes employing Adaptive Mesh Refinement. He moved together with the group to the University of New Hampshire in summer 2003.
His research aims to gain a better understanding of fast reconnection processes in two-fluid systems, applicable to laboratory as well as space plasmas. The focus of his work is on sophisticated, high performance, massively parallel numerical methods, in particular block-structured adaptive mesh refinement to efficiently resolve a large range of spatial scales and implicit Newton-Krylov-Schwarz based methods to overcomestability limitations present in explicit numerical schemes.
Research Professor, Physics Department and the Space Science Center of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire. Professor Isenberg received his S.B. in Physics from MIT in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1976. Following postdoc appointments at the University of Arizona and UCSD, he joined the Theory Group in the Space Science Center at UNH in 1981 to work on the acceleration of the solar wind. His current research interests still include solar wind heating and acceleration, as well as theoretical modeling of solar prominance eruptions, kinetic wave-particle interactions, and the dynamics of interstellar pickup ions.
Joe Klewicki's formal education is in Mechanical Engineering with BS, MS and PhD degrees respectively from Michigan State University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Michigan State University. His areas of expertise are in fluid dynamics, as well as experimental methods and their application in complex, unsteady and turbulent flows. His primary focus is in the dynamics of wall-bounded turbulent flows, the vorticity dynamics of these flows, and their Reynolds number scaling. Practical applications of this research include the flow over external surfaces (planes, submarines), mixing and transport in pipes, biological flows (blood flow) and near-surface atmospheric flows (relating, for example, to pollutant dispersion in cities). More recently he has also been engaged the development of mathematical methods for the scaling of indeterminate equations of the type that occur in MHD turbulence. Over the course of his career Professor Klewicki has graduated 10 PhDs and 26 MS students, and with these students has published about 60 peer-reviewed journal articles. He is a Fellow of the ASME and a Distinguished Alumnus of Michigan State University. He is currently the Dean of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
Chung-Sang Ng is a Research Assistant Professor in the Space Science Center and Department of Physics at University of New Hampshire. He received his Ph.D. degree from Auburn University in 1994. His research interests are in theoretical/computational plasma physics, mainly with phenomena related to plasma waves, with applications in space science and fusion research. He has worked on magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, heating of the solar corona and the solar wind, magnetic reconnection, field-line resonances in ionoshpere-magnetosphere, landau damping and BGK solutions of electrostatic plasma waves, singularity formation in hydrodynamics, free electron lasers, dusty plasmas, mode conversion in fusion plasmas, and radiation in classical electrodynamics.
Research Scientist, Space Science Center and Department of Physics, University of New Hampshire.
John Podesta received his PhD in Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He started his career in space science at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2004 where he conducted theoretical and experimental research on solar wind turbulence. He joined the UNH Space Science Center in 2007 and is actively involved in the development of direct numerical simulations of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. His scientific interests include solar physics, space physics, solar wind research, spacecraft data analysis, plasma turbulence, and computational physics.
Following the completion his PhD degree from MIT in 1991, Barrett Rogers went on to research positions at MIT under a DOE Postdoctoral Fellowship Award and the University of Maryland at College Park. He joined the Dartmouth faculty in the fall of 2001 where is now an Associate Professor of Physics. His research field is theoretical and computational plasma physics and his ongoing work addresses a range of topics in astrophysical and laboratory plasmas, including magnetic reconnection, plasma turbulence, and magnetically confined fusion.
Bernard J. Vasquez Research Associate Professor, Space Science Center and Department of Physics, University of New Hamsphire and member of the UNH Solar Terrestrial Theory Group. Dr. Vasquez completed his dissertation in Astronomy entitled "Nonlinear Wave Evolution in a Dispersive Plasma: Application to Rotational Discontinuities" at the University of Maryland, College Park with Prof. K. Papadopoulos and Prof. P. Cargill in 1992. He joined UNH in 1993 as a post-doctoral researcher. Vasquez's research interest are primarily in the area of solar wind, magnetopause, magnetic clouds, waves, discontinuities, ion kinetics, reconnection, and numerical simulations. He has authored or co-authered over 20 published papers.
Research Scientist, Space Science Center of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire. Dr. Hongang Yang obtained his Ph.D. in National Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2006. His thesis was "Simulation studies on the Hall current effect in the magnetic reconnection and magnetic flux rope structures in the magnetotail", and he mainly uses resistive and Hall MHD simulations. After a half-year's postdoctoral work, he came to join Prof. Bhattacharjee. His research interests include MHD theory, magnetic reconnection and magnetotail dynamics.
