Research Personnel

Assistant Professor Chuanfei Dong (AST)

Star-Terrestrial Planet Interactions in Our Solar System and Beyond; Magnetic Reconnection and Turbulence; Wave-Particle Interaction; Physics-informed Machine Learning; High Intensity Laser-Plasma Interaction.

Professor Dong joined the Department of Astronomy and Center for Space Physics at Boston University as an Assistant Professor in Spring 2023. Prior to that, he was a Staff Scientist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (.gov) – a DOE National Laboratory managed by Princeton University and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University.

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Professor Merav Opher (AST)

Computational and theoretical plasma physics in space and astrophysics; Interaction of the solar system with the interstellar medium; solar wind; shocks in the lower corona, T-Tauri and Solar-Like Stars.

Merav Opher’s interests are in how plasma and magnetic effects reveal themselves in astrophysical and space physics environments. In particular, in how stars interact with the surrounding media, how the solar system interacts with the local interstellar medium, and the interaction of extra-solar planets with their host stars. Her other interests are in how magnetic disturbances are driven and propagate from the Sun to Earth. She uses state-of the art 3D computational models to investigate these phenomena.

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Professor Meers Oppenheim (AST)

Computational and theoretical space plasma physics; dymanics of the E-region ionosphere; particle-wave interactions in the auroral ionosphere and magnetosphere; physics and observations of meteoroids and meteor plasmas

Professor Oppenheim studies space plasma physics using supercomputer simulations, theory, and data. He works on a range of topics, including ionospheric and solar collisional plasmas, particle-wave interactions, and the physics of meteor trails. In 2016, he has been working to incorporate the important effects of ionospheric turbulence into planetary scale simulations of the coupled magnetosphere, ionosphere and atmosphere. He has also been trying to model wave heating of the solar chromosphere. Most recently, he has also been working on understanding the effects of UV photoelectrons on the ionosphere and their observational consequences. Improving our understanding of these systems enables us to better characterize energy flows in the upper atmosphere.

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