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Published: 03 August 2023

From the Directors

ISSI Staff

Rumi Nakamura and Geraint Jones appointed as ISSI Discipline Scientists

ISSI is pleased to announce that Dr. Rumi Nakamura and Prof. Geraint Jones have been appointed as Discipline Scientists as of 1st July 2023. We welcome two outstanding additions to the ISSI Team: Plasma Discipline Scientist Dr. Rumi Nakamura, and Planetary Discipline Scientist Prof. Geraint Jones. Not only Discipline Scientists provide scientific expertise that is complementary to the current ISSI portfolio, but, most important, they are ISSI Ambassadors with their unique communities. As such, they will channel ideas and develop scientific initiatives that will best serve their community, while at the same time explore ways to identify how best ISSI can advance the scientific discourse in their respective fields.

Rumi Nakamura

Rumi Nakamura did her PHD research on “Aurora dynamics and particle injection associated with magnetospheric substorms” at the University Tokyo in Japan. She is currently a group leader at Space Research Institute (IWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences and Lecturer at University of Graz in Austria. Her research interest are space plasma physics; plasma transport and acceleration in the magnetosphere, magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, solar wind magnetosphere interaction, substorm and storm dynamics. She participated in a number of ESA and NASA space plasma physics missions such as Cluster, DoubleStar, THEMIS as a Co-Investigator and is currently leading the Active Spacecraft Potential Control (ASPOC) instrument for Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.

Geraint Jones

Geraint Jones is Professor of Planetary Science at the UCL Department of Space and Climate Physics and is head of MSSL’s Planetary Science Group in the UK. Geraint Jones’ primarily research interests are outer planet systems and cometary science. He has been a member of three different instrument teams on the Cassini-Huygens mission, and is a member of two JUICE teams. His interest in cometary science have concentrated on interactions between comets and the solar wind, as well as modelling the large-scale structure of dust tails. Topics of particular interest include the behaviour of comets near the Sun, and serendipitous comet tail crossings, of which he has found several examples. Geraint led the proposal to ESA for the Comet Interceptor mission to an undiscovered long-period comet. This project adopted by the agency in 2022, and is planned to launch in 2029. He has been appointed as an interdisciplinary scientist on the mission.

edited by Andrea Fischer

Credits ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Martel