Heidi Katariina Nykyri

(RESEARCH AST, FIELDS AND PARTICLES)

Heidi Katariina Nykyri's Contact Card & Information.
Email:	katariina.nykyri@nasa.gov
Org Code:	673
Address:	NASA/GSFC Mail Code 673 Greenbelt, MD 20771
Employer:	NASA

Missions & Projects

Brief Bio

Education

Positions/Employment

Selected Publications

Teaching Experience

Professional Societies

Professional Service

Awards

Brief Bio

Dr. Nykyri performed the first quantitative determination of plasma transport rate due to reconnection in

Kelvin-Helmholtz Vortices in 2001 and obtained her Ph.D in Physics in University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2002. She then continued to work as Postdoctoral researcher, performing research on 4 spacecraft Cluster mission, in Space and Atmospheric Physics group, in Imperial College London. Using Cluster data she found first observational evidence of magnetic reconnection in Kelvin-Helmholtz Vortices and determined the sources of magnetic turbulence in the high-altitude cusps.

In January 2007, she started as an Assistant Professor of Physics in Embry-Riddle aeronautical university (ERAU) which at the time only had an undergraduate space physics program. At ERAU, Nykyri contributed building the Ph.D program in engineering physics and she developed new space plasma physics and space weather courses at undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D level. Nykyri was tenured and promoted early to Associate Professor in 2010, and to a Full Professor of Physics in 2016. With help of series of NSF and NASA grants (including NSF CAREER award in 2009) Nykyri established the Laboratory for Solar-Magnetosphere-Ionosphere research where she mentored and has acted as thesis advisor for 12 graduate students and six postdoctoral scholars. With one of the Ph.D students she first quantified the plasma heating due to magnetosonic waves driven by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability which was published in Nature Physics in 2016. The series of research papers published by Nykyri's research group between 2013-2021 identified the cross-scale energy transport mechanisms resulting in plasma sheet temperature asymmetry of the cold-component ions.

Supported by grants from NSF and NASA and using Cluster and MMS data between 2012-2021, Nykyri also demonstrated how large-scale diamagnetic cavities (DMCs), formed by magnetic reconnection and acting on a 3-D magnetic field topology, can work as efficient particle accelerators up to several 100s of keV energies.

In 2017, Nykyri was appointed the Director of Space Weather at ERAU's Centre for Space and Atmospheric Research (CSAR) and associate director of CSAR. In 2018-2021, Nykyri also served as the Dean of Research at ERAU's College of Arts and Sciences (COAS). Dr. Nykyri acted as a focus group leader for NSF's GEM magnetosheath focus group between 2009-2014 and as a Solar Wind Magnetosphere Interactions- research area coordinator between 2012-2018. Since 2020, Nykyri has served as the Vice-chair for Magnetospheric division at Committee of Space Research (COSPAR). Throughout her career, she has served in many AGU committees, and convened and chaired scientific sessions at the AGU and COSPAR meetings.

In 2017, Nykyri started leading the Seven Sisters multi-scale solar wind mission concept which was motivated by several research discoveries on the impact of solar wind and IMF structure on the accuracy of space weather forecasting. This was enabled by funding from NSF GEM, NASA HSR and NASA HGI programs. For example, in 2019, using 14 spacecraft conjunction, she demonstrated how a 2 GM poloidal solar wind fluctuation resulted in magnetosheath jets and created -30 nT B_z burstsin the magnetosheath, while upstream solar wind monitors continued to measure a positive B_z. These negative B_zbursts resulted in dayside reconnection, enhanced flux loading into the magnetotail which triggered a tail reconnection, Pi2 pulsations on the ground, ejection of a plasmoid (tail reconnection and plasmoid were identified by Nykyri's Master's student) which was detected by lunar orbiting ARTEMIS spacecraft and a substorm onset ~ 16 minutes later. In 2021, Nykyri identified the source region of the energetic electron microinjections at the high-latitude magnetospheric boundary layer and how the electron fluxes were modulated by the drift mirror instability, and where the anisotropy was likely driven by the particle acceleration mechanisms in the nearby diamagnetic cavity. In 2023, Nykyri' team was awarded NASA Living with a Star (LWS) award to study the impact of the solar wind fluctuations and structure on the magnetospheric dynamics and energetic particle properties, extending up to lunar orbit.

Nykyri joined NASA GSFC in January 2024 and since March 2024, she is working as a deputy project scientist for the Magnetosphere-Multi-scale mission. She is currently actively performing heliospheric research using MMS data and data also from other space missions. She is working with her team on further maturing the Seven Sisters mission concept, now called the Solar Wind Multi-Scale mission, consisting of Seven Sisters satellites with identical plasma and field instrumentation. The mission will determine the multi-scale structure of the solar wind and quantify the role of the different particle energization mechanisms in the solar wind structures. As the mission would spend > 550 days directly upstream of the Earth, this mission would provide an unique opportunity to develop and test space weather prediction tools and provide up to 1-2 day prediction of the solar wind plasma conditions and IMF orientation.

Education

Ph.D in Physics, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2002

M.S degree in Computational Physics, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2002

M.S degree in Theoretical Physics, University of Helsinki, Finland, 1998

Positions/Employment

Deputy Project Scientist for Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission

NASA GSFC - Greenbelt, MD

March 2024 - Present