Introducing the 2019 SDO Mentors
Mentor : 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.
Mentor: Mark Cheung
Mark Cheung is an astrophysicist at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory and Stanford University. His scientific interests cover the Sun, space weather, cool stars and plasmas and magnetic fields pervading the universe. He is the Principal Investigator for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on board NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. He loves having thousands of computers work for him.
Mentor: Meng Jin
Meng is a heliophysicist at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory and SETI Institute. He received his doctorate in Space Physics & Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2014. His research focuses on the origin of space weather: solar activity in the form of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), CME-driven shocks, and solar energetic particle events. By combining numerical simulations and observations, he is trying to advance our understanding of the physical processes at work during the propagation of CMEs from the Sun through the heliosphere. His recent research activity extends to exo-solar and exo-planetary systems to simulate their stellar winds and stellar CMEs as well as the influences on the habitability of the exo-planets. He was a former NASA Jack Eddy Fellow from 2014-2016.
Mentor: Atilim Gunes Baydin
Atilim Gunes Baydin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, working at the intersection of generative modeling, probabilistic programming, and deep learning. His current work is on enabling efficient probabilistic inference in large-scale simulators in particle physics, in collaboration with CERN researchers. He co-organizes the Deep Learning for Physical Sciences workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, covering applications of machine learning to problems in physical sciences. He received his PhD in artificial intelligence from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 2013. His research interests also include automatic differentiation, hyperparameter optimization, and evolutionary algorithms.
Mentor: Bennie Lewis
Dr. Bennie G. Lewis Jr. is a Research Scientist in the Advanced Technology Center at Lockheed Martin Space Sunnyvale/Palo Alto California with a focus on AI, Deep Learning / Machine Learning, AR/VR, Embedded Systems, Cognitive Systems, Space Systems, Human Machine Interaction, and Robotics. Prior to his current role, he was a Software Engineer for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control Orlando Florida. He has a B.S. and M.S in Computer Engineering as well as a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering with a focus in robotics and intelligent systems from the Department of Electrical Engineer and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida working in the Intelligent Agents Lab.