What is one thing you wish the public understood about your field of work?
Outer space is not empty. Emptiness implies that there is nothing contained in it, however the space between planets is in fact filled with a mixture of very diffuse ionized gas (plasma) and radiation. To paint a picture, the mass density of air at sea level is approximately 1 kg/m³. while the mass density of steel is 8000 kg/m³. Our everyday experience is filled with objects 1000 times denser than the space between them. An empty space on Earth with “nothing in it” is filled with air.
Outer space is like this with plasma. The mass density of the various plasmas that exist between the planets are 10-19 – 10-12 kg/m³. That is more different from air than the difference between steel and air. This is why outer space is called a “vacuum.” To humans, this is too little mass to breathe or pressurize open containers of liquid. However, it is not empty.
The plasma that fills this space conducts electricity and has a magnetic field. It also has weather patterns (“space weather”), shock waves (“the planetary bow shock”), and quite regularly becomes energized to high energy (think the electron beam in old TVs). This fundamental fact is why satellite computers need to be “radiation hardened.” The effect of a spacecraft flying through the plasma is that occasionally a well-positioned electron will mess with circuitry. This doesn’t really happen on Earth because the air and water are thick enough to create a built-in radiation shield. The non-emptiness of outer space is responsible for the aurora borealis, the Van Allen radiation belts, the levitation of lunar regolith, skywave radio, the atmospheric erosion of Mars, and many other aspects of nature beyond Earth. If space was truly empty, then these effects wouldn’t happen.
Geomagnetic storm over Virginia. If outer space was empty, there would be no lights in the sky.
What do you enjoy the most about your job?
One of the greatest things about this job is constantly getting to learn about new things and understanding the connections between various ideas. Nature has certain patterns that tend to repeat themselves in different contexts. In the field of plasma physics, this typically comes up as something seen in space showing up in terrestrial environments, such as experimental nuclear fusion reactors. Our sun is after all, a naturally occurring gravitationally confined fusion device. For example, one of the seminal discoveries in plasma physics, the Alfvén wave (which won the 1970 Nobel prize), is both regularly observed in tokamaks (like in the picture below) and in the Earth’s magnetosphere. Alfvén waves are a coupled motion in a plasma where a hydrodynamic wave, like a ripple on the surface of a pond, couples to an electromagnetic wave since the plasma conducts electricity. Therefore, we regularly observe motion of the plasma at the same time as a signal on an antenna, a small amount of electrical current along the magnetic field line, and a wriggle of the magnetic field itself.
Inside of a decommissioned tokamak at UCLA
What does a typical day at work look like for you?
A scientist’s job is to learn things and write them down in. My research is almost entirely done by solving equations either with a computer or on pen/paper. The laws of nature are expressed in the solutions to math equations. My job is to solve these and compare them to measurements taken by spacecraft. Oftentimes, this act of comparison tells something crucial about the thing we’re observing.
What is one space mission that you are particularly excited about, and why?
TRACERS! The Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS) mission launched in July 2025, and I have had the privilege of being part of the science team.
One big downside to satellite observations is that if the science measurement of interest is at a certain point, you only fly through it once per orbit. So, it is almost impossible to “watch” something without large gaps in time. Think of flying through the radiation pattern above the aurora. If you want to watch how a given ribbon of light swirls around, ideally you would place your detector at a fixed position above the ribbon and measure the particle fluxes. However, orbital mechanics forbids a satellite to stay at a fixed position in the sky except at a special altitude that is too far away to detect the radiation pattern.
TRACERS gets us closer to this ideal by running two satellites on a string-of-pearls configuration. This way, for a given “spot” above the ground, we get two snapshots within a couple seconds of each other. This allows scientists to disentangle a lot of “spatial vs. temporal” kinds of questions about the aurora. Did the thing we saw one orbit ago change in place or did it move?
TRACERS science meeting at West Virginia University
What science question intrigues you the most?
My research keeps coming back to nonlinear wave formation in plasmas, even in wildly different context. Just like bodies of water, plasmas create waves. In fact, since plasmas conduct electricity, the waves they create can be measured with an antenna! This means that “radio static” that a lot of satellites hear comes from the natural plasma winds. If human ears were attuned to hear sound in the ambient pressure of outer space, presumably this is also what they would hear. https://space-audio.org/ is a neat website that catalogs some examples of this.
My first paper dealt with the formation of a standing wave pattern inside the exhaust plume of Hall effect thrusters, a plasma-based propulsion device that is very commonly used to perform maneuvers on satellites. When musical instruments play a note, a standing wave is set up in the cavity of the instrument at a certain set of frequencies. Changing the properties of the instrument, such as the length of a string, modifies the resonant frequency. A similar thing happens in Hall effect thrusters, which gives rise to a particular erosion pattern of the ceramic material the thruster is made of. The typical failure mode of these devices is channel wall erosion, so understanding the mechanism of this erosion will help build longer lasting Hall thrusters.
All these years later, my interest continues to be drawn towards how waves develop in plasmas. A recent study of mine showed that certain plasma waves in the Earth’s magnetosphere undergo a process where they curl up on themselves (steepen), just like ocean waves crashing on a beach. This steepening process explains quirk where the portion of the electric field that is aligned with the magnetic field appears first on the leading edge of the wave followed by the electric field being predominantly perpendicular to the background field. The parallel electric field is responsible for turning magnetic energy in the wave into high energy electrons that create part of the aurora.
What early career advice do you have for those looking to do what you do?
It’s important to seek out opportunities to learn from a lot of places. Knowledge tends to cluster in groups of people. It’s important to spend time with these different groups and learn from them. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate school, I attended a handful of summer schools and internships including the NSF REU program at Texas A&M University (where I first learned about plasma physics), the Orion space capsule software engineering group at Johnson Space Center, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the MaSAG summer school at INGV Rome, and the Space Weather Summer School at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In eight-ish years of school, I spent five summers out of town doing these kinds of activities. I came away from every single one with another tool in my belt that I use every day.
Hiking around the desert near Los Alamos, NM in between summer school classes.
Published Date: .
Hometown:
Buffalo, NY, United States
Undergraduate Degrees:
B.S. Aerospace Engineering with minor in Physics from The State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
B.A. Mathematics from The State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Post-graduate Degrees:
M.S. Aerospace Engineering from the University at Maryland, College Park, MDPh.D. Aerospace Engineering from the University at Maryland, College Park, MD