Autor: Vassilis Angelopoulos

Professor C. T. Russell is a member of the faculties of both the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and the Department of Earth and Space Sciences. He is acting System-wide Director of IGPP. He is the head of the Space Physics Center in IGPP, UCLA and the Director of the UCLA Branch of the California Space Grant Consortium. He is the principal investigator on the POLAR mission; a co-investigator on the magnetometer team on the Cassini mission to Saturn; the ROMAP investigation on the Rosetta mission to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko; the IMPACT investigation on the STEREO mission to study solar and solar wind disturbances; the THEMIS mission to study substorms; and the magnetometer investigation on the Venus Express mission to study the solar wind interaction with Venus. He is the principal investigator of the Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. Professor V. Angelopoulos obtained his Ph.D. in Physics, with a specialization in Space Plasma Physics, in 1993 from the University of California Los Angeles. His current research aims to understand how particles are accelerated in Earth’s magnetosphere, how the upper atmosphere and ionosphere respond to space currents, and how the lunar environment is affected by its interaction with the solar wind. Prof. Angelopoulos holds appointments at the Space Sciences Laboratory, UCB and at the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has been the Principal Investigator of THEMIS, the scientific and technical lead of this NASA/MIDEX mission, since its inception in 2001. He is currently working on storms and substorms at Earth while incorporating new data from the Moon”s plasma environment, as part of the ARTEMIS mission. Prior to joining the University of California in 1995, Angelopoulos worked at the Applied Physics Laboratory from 1993-1995. He received the American Geophysical Union’s Macelwane medal in 1993 and the Zeldovich medal by the Russian Academy of Science and COSPAR in 2001.