Toshi Nishimura

Research Interests: Aurora, Solar wind-Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Interaction, Ionosphere-Thermosphere Interaction at Earth, Optical and Radar Imaging, Space Weather

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/toshinishimurabu/

Toshi Nishimura graduated the Department of Geophysics, Tohoku University, Japan in 2009. He was a JSPS Research Fellow at the Nagoya University, Japan until 2011, and he came to UCLA initially as a visiting scholar and now he is an assistant researcher. He received Student Paper Awards at 2006 AGU Fall Meeting and 2007 SGEPSS Fall Meeting. He also received an Obayashi Young Scientist Award in 2014. His research has been supported by 12 grants from NASA, NSF and JSPS, and his research led to more than 140 refereed papers. His research vision is to pursue coupling processes across different regimes in the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere-Thermosphere system, including coupling among the dayside-plasma sheet-inner magnetosphere using new high-resolution imaging in the polar region, and coupling to the upper neutral atmosphere by combining satellite observations and numerical simulations. He currently supervises a graduate student and two postdoctoral scholars. They study auroral physics in the dayside ionosphere, polar cap, and nightside auroral and subauroral regions for understanding the structure and evolution of fast transient plasma flows and their influence on magnetospheric structures. Bea Gallardo-Lacourt received a First Place Prize at the 2014 CEDAR workshop for having the best student paper, and an Outstanding Student Paper Award at 2014 AGU Fall Meeting. Ying Zou received Jacob A. Bjerknes Award from UCLA for academic excellence and UCAR Jack Eddy Fellowship. Boyi Wang received GEM student poster award. He has also worked with two undergraduate students and a high-school student.