Graduate Students

Graduate Students

Jules Van Irsel

“ Jules joined the team in September 2019 as a graduate student at Dartmouth College. He graduated from University of Calgary, with a major in astrophysics. Right now he is working on his Ph.D. project:

“I am studying the coupling between the plasma in outer space and the plasma down in our atmosphere via the Earth’s magnetic field. Particularly, this thesis will study the way the atmospheric layer of plasma (the ionosphere) can act analogous to a non-passive resistor in an electric circuit.

The physics here is complex and intrinsically 3-dimensional, but due to the sub-global scale of the aurora it has been difficult to gather 3D data  to drive physics-based models, hence there hadn’t been much focus on developing 3D ionospheric models. However, with the development of recent multi-point ground, sounding rocket, and satellite-based experiments, this has changed. I use the Geospace Environment Model of Ion-Neutral Interactions (GEMINI) which has, in recent years, been used to explore this avenue. My thesis will make use of it to figure out more secrets about the northern lights.

Alexander Mule

Alex joined the team in September 2020 as a first year graduate student. Like Jules, he is also studying the coupling of the magnetosphere and ionosphere and associated current closure. Approaching from a data driven perspective, he is combining heterogenous data sources and generating new derived data products to drive GEMINI and other models, investing the arc-scale structure of current closure.

Magdalina Moses

Magda is a 4th year PhD student, beginning at dartmouth in Fall 2019 after completing a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech. She is primarily working on Petite-Ion Probe (PIP) flight data analysis and visualization tools with a focus on the Kinetic-scale energy & momentum transport experiment (KiNET-X) sounding rocket mission (launched in May 2021). She also assists with various sounding rocket missions’ instrument assembly, bench testing and vacuum chamber testing. 

Charlie Acomb

Charlie graduated from the University of Minnesota in Spring 2024, beginning at Dartmouth that fall. At UMN, he contributed to research using precipitating electron flux data to fit the atmospheric neutral density profile. He is excited to contribute to studies on the interaction between the ionosphere and the neutral sphere.