Vassilis Angelopoulos obtained his B.S. from the U. of Thessaloniki, Greece, and earned a Ph.D. at UCLA in 1993. After appointments at JHU/APL, NASA/JPL and UCB/SSL, he has been at UCLA since 2007. He is the PI of the NASA/MIDEX THEMIS and ARTEMIS missions (a 5 satellite constellation launched in 2007 and still in operation) and of NASA/NSF ELFIN, a dual CubeSat mission launched in 2018 and successfully operated through its atmospheric re-entry in 2022. He studies 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. He currently serves as the US representative to COSPAR and a member of its bureau. He has been honored with the 2024 NASA Outstanding Public Leadership Medal, and UCLA’s 2020 Inaugural Physical Sciences Centennial Mentorship Award. He has co-authored 800 publications. More that 400 undergraduates were trained under his mentorship during the ELFIN CubeSat program.
Starting in the summer of 2020, the International Space Science Institute has organised the weekly on-line seminar series called “Game Changers”. After six series of weekly talks on the themes of “Missions that Changed the Game in Solar System, Astrophysics and Earth Sciences” , “Ideas and Findings about the Solar System, the Universe and our Terrestrial Environment”, “Habitability – From Cosmic to Microbial Scales”, “Viewing Earth from Space – the Changing Environment and Climate of our Planet”, and “Captivating Cosmology: From the Big Bang to Tomorrow” and the topic “Space Environmental Hazards: Mitigation and Prediction”, the webinar series continues on a monthly basis.
