VT SuperDARN student Muhammad Maimaiti defended his doctoral disseration on Thursday, November 21 to an examining committee of six professors. Muhammad is advised by Drs. Jo Baker and Mike Ruohoniemi. He has published in leading journals on topics as varied as reconnection dynamics, subauroral electric fields, and the prediction of auroral substorm onset using machine learning techniques. The title of his dissertation is 'Driving Influences of Ionospheric Electrodynamics at Mid- and High-Latitudes'. While working towards his doctoral degree Muhammad also earned a dual M.A. in Data Analysis & Applied Statistcs from the Department of Statistics.

Congratulations, Muhammad!

At the 2019 NSF CEDAR Workshop Muhammad won a poster prize in the MLT category (pictured).

The Los Alamos Space Weather Summer School is accepting applications for its 2020 session to be held June 1 - July 31, 2020. Sponsored by the Center for Space and Earth Sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), this summer school brings together top space science graduate students and LANL space scientists to work on challenging space weather research. Students receive a prestigious Vela Fellowship (worth $10,000 to cover travel and living expenses), technical training, and opportunities for professional development.

Eligibility: Open to U.S. and foreign graduate students currently enrolled in PhD programs in space physics, planetary science, aerospace engineering, or related fields. For more details see 'Read More' or the website http://swx-school.lanl.gov

Applications due: early January 2020

Duration: June 19-25, 2020
Location: NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia

Open to: US Citizens and Permanent Residents
Application Deadline: 30 April 2020
Apply Through: http://tinyurl.com/2020RockOn

How it works: You register to participate and, when selected, you are invited to stay in scenic Chincoteague, Virginia (next to the Wallops Flight Facility) for the duration of the program, assembling and then flying a rocket payload as part of a team of rocketeers.Teams of 3 build a sounding rocket payload from a kit in three days and launch it into space on the sixth day. Since 2008, 702 people have participated in the RockOn workshops and successfully built and launched 226 payloads to space. The hardware in the kit may be used on future RockSat (and possibly CubeSat) flights. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility will again be providing the rocket (two stage Terrier-Orion) and launch operations during the 2020 workshop. This hands-on workshop is about learning to build sounding rocket payloads, not rockets. RockOn is supported by the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant programs with significant cost sharing from Wallops and NASA Education. The registration for the 2020 RockOn workshop, is $909 if your register by March 6, 2020 ($999 after), which includes kit hardware (that teams take home), breakfast and lunch each day plus one dinner, t-shirt, handbook, software, and more plus a priceless experience. For more information on the workshop, please visit the website.

Shibaji Chakraborty successfully sat his PhD Preliminary Exam on Wednesday, November 13 before a committee of seven professors. Shibaji has authored and co-authored papers that focus on the impacts of solar flares on the ionosphere, in particular, the effects of the ionization enhancement that leads to shortwave fadeout (SWF). This is the fastest form of space weather felt by Earth with only an 8 min delay for propagation of enhanced X-ray and EUV radiation from the sun. Shibaji is currently developing a model that incorporates the physis and chemistry that are needed to account for HF absorption in the ionospheric D region during geomagnetic disturbances. He now passes into PhD Candidate status.

Congratulations, Shibaji!

Photo credit: Muhammad Maimaiti

As reported by the University of Scranton and the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), Virginia Tech alumnus Nathaniel Frissell has won a $1.3 million, 3-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study weather effects in the ionosphere by leveraging a network of amateur radio stations as a Distributed Arrays of Small Instruments (DASI) project. Principal investigator Frissell will head a collaborative team that will develop ground-based space science observation instruments and software. His research effort will recruit multiple universities and radio amateurs to operate a network of personal space weather stations.

Nathaniel initiated his studies of space weather with amateur radio networks as a graduate student with the SuperDARN HF radar group at Virginia Tech where he graduated in 2016. Recently he has begun a faculty position at the University of Scranton after holding positions at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The University of Scranton news item can be found at https://news.scranton.edu/articles/2019/11/news-faculty-nsfgrant-frissell.shtml

Congratulations to Nathaniel on this success from his advisors and colleagues at Virginia Tech!

Photo credit: The University of Scranton 'Royal News'

Applications are open for the 2020 Heliophysics Summer School to be held in beautiful Boulder, CO over 14-21 July, 2020. Advanced graduate students and post doctoral fellows who have completed some research in the area of space physics or related fields are eligible. The aim of the summer school is to provide students with the background and understanding they need to do research and make discoveries about the interconnected Heliophysics system in their professional careers.
Application Deadline: February 21, 2020
For additional information on the Summer School and instructions on how to apply:
https://cpaess.ucar.edu/heliophysics/summer-school
Photo credit: CPAESS Heliophysics Summer School website