Katariina Nykyri

Dr. Nykyri obtained her master's degree in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki, Finland, in 1998 after which she continued with her education to earn her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Alaska--Fairbanks, as well as another M.S. degree in Computational Physics. In her Ph.D. thesis she demonstrated for the first time how Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability can produce significant plasma transport due to magnetic reconnection. She obtained her doctorate in Physics in 2002 after which she worked as a post-doctoral research associate at the Imperial College, London, between 2002-2007. She is a co-investigator for the Flux Gate Magnetometer onboard 4 Cluster spacecraft and received in 2005 the European Space Agency's award for Cluster Exploration of Geospace. In January 2007 she started as an assistant professor of Physics at Embry-Riddle and was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2010, and to a full professor of physics in 2016. Dr. Nykyri has an externally funded research program in magnetospheric physics and supervises ERAU undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. student research. Her major research interests involve understanding the physical mechanisms that transport and heat plasma in solar wind-magnetosphere systems. Dr. Nykyri was awarded the NSF career award in 2009 and ERAU researcher of the year award in 2010. She is a co-director of the ERAU's LASMIR laboratory. She is currently a Steering committee member of the National Science Foundation's GEM program. Since 2015, Dr. Nykyri is the Space Physics Program Coordinator at ERAU.