Mark Cheung (chair)
Mark Cheung is a Senior Staff Physicist at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. His scientific investigations take place at the intersection of research themes connecting the Sun with Earth, magnetic fields with plasmas, and machine learning with space physics. As principal investigator for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mission, various Heliophysics research grants, and mentor for the Frontier Development Lab, he works with teams of scientists and engineers who operate space telescopes, perform data mining and data analysis on terabyte- and petabyte-scale data archives, develop massively parallel numerical simulation codes, and apply machine learning techniques for scientific discovery and space exploration. Mark studied at the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Göttingen, Germany before moving to California in 2006. He is a recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society and the Karen Harvey Prize from the American Astronomical Society.
Monica Bobra
Monica Bobra is a research scientist at Stanford University in the W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, where she studies the Sun and space weather as a member of the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory science team. She previously worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where she studied solar flares as a member of two NASA Heliophysics missions called TRACE and Hinode. Her research focuses on analyzing large data sets, on the scale of terabytes t petabytes, that describe the Sun and space weather and is the author of a book on the subject. She also serves as Vice Chair of the advisory board for the SunPy Project, a Python-based ecosystem of open-source software for data analysis in solar physics, and the heliophysics editor for the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). She also is a frequent contributor to popular science magazines such as Sky & Telescope and Scientific American, covering topics related to the Sun and Sun-like stars.
Miho Janvier
Miho Janvier is a space physicist at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, France. Her work focuses on the understanding of when solar flares occur, how solar storms travel in space and how they impact planetary environments in the solar system. In a nutshell, she works towards a better prediction of “space weather,” with a goal of better understanding the influence of the Sun’s activity on human societies. She uses data from space missions from NASA, ESA and JAXA as well as developing 3D computer models of solar eruptions. Miho is also involved as the deputy project scientist on the instrument SPICE as well as a scientific co-Investigator on the instrument EUI on board Solar Orbiter, the next European Space Agency mission to explore the Sun and its close neighbourhood. Her passion for astrophysics and science communication has led her to develop several science communication projects: she partnered with the movie production company TreeHouse Digital Ltd to develop a 360 degrees experience of a solar storm using science data and VFX, and is currently developing a project to showcase the Solar Orbiter mission in Virtual Reality.
Jack Ireland
Jack Ireland is a research astrophysicist working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His scientific research focuses on the understanding the quiescent and flaring solar atmosphere through the application of novel data analysis techniques. He runs the Solar Data Analysis Center, a NASA facility with responsibility for supporting solar physics research by providing access to petabytes of solar data, and software to enable the analysis of that data. He is also a co-Principal Investigator of the Helioviewer Project, a solar physics data visualization effort, co-founder and board member of SunPy, a Python-based ecosystem of open-source software for data analysis in solar physics, and is currently serving as the US Project Scientist for the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). He also helped run the Solar Image Processing Workshops, which built a cross-disciplinary community bringing together signal processing experts and heliophysicists to work on the outstanding challenges in understanding solar activity and space weather.