Institute for Space Weather Sciences

Colloquium Speaker:  Dr. Vania Jordanova
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Dr. Jordanova is a Senior Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory with over 25 years of experience bridging theoretical plasma physics, data analysis, and computational modeling. Her area of expertise includes geomagnetic storm dynamics and processes that couple the ionospheric and magnetospheric regions. She created a state-of-the-art large-scale kinetic model that simulates the near-Earth transport of energetic particles in realistic electric and magnetic fields. Originally from Bulgaria, she received a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Space Sciences from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Jordanova has been the Principal Investigator (PI) on numerous magnetospheric projects sponsored by NASA or NSF and is a Co-I on two NASA Van Allen Probes instrument teams. She was the PI of the 2017 R&D100 Award Winner SHIELDS project, which investigated Space Hazards Induced near Earth by Large Dynamic Storms. Dr. Jordanova has more than 150 scientific publications and edited a book on “Ring Current Investigations: The Quest for Space Weather Predictions”. She is currently the LANL/CSES Focus Lead for Space Science and the Chair of the NSF/Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) Program Steering Committee. She has received two Los Alamos Distinguished Performance Awards and was named a Laboratory Fellow in 2020.