NASA Office of STEM Engagement (OSE) opened a call for graduate research proposals on December 23, 2019. The NASA Research Announcement (NRA) NNH20ZHA001N: NASA Fellowship Activity 2020 is seeking student-authored and independently conceived graduate research proposals responding to a NASA Research Opportunity listed in the solicitation. The 2020 NASA Fellowship Activity is designed to support OSE objectives and provide academic institutions the ability to enhance graduate-level learning and development. The program details and requirements are outlined in the solicitation document.

To be eligible to submit a proposal, candidates must be U.S. citizens or a national who hold a bachelor's degree in a STEM field earned before Aug. 31, 2020. Candidates must be enrolled in a Master's or Doctoral degree program no later than Sept. 1, 2020, and intend to pursue a research-based Master’s or Ph.D. program in a NASA-relevant field.

Proposals are due February 21, 2020.

Ke Li has been visiting with the SuperDARN group and assisting her supervisor, Dr. Erxiao Lui, since October. She is a graduate student at the School of Communication Engineering at Hangzhou Dianzi University. During her stay Ke made a presentation to the group on her experience as a student and conducted research under the supervision of Dr. Lui and Dr. Ruohoniemi. She now returns home in time to celebrate Chinese New Year. The members of the VT SuperDARN group wish her the best!

Pictured: Shibaji Chakraborty, Bharat Kunduri, Erxiao Lui, Mike Ruohoniemi, Ke Li, Jo Baker, JianJun Liu (visiting from the Polar Research Institute of China, Shanghai)

Photo credit: Augustine Yellu

VT SuperDARN student Muhammad Maimaiti defended his doctoral disseration on Thursday, November 21 to an examining committee of six professors. Muhammad is advised by Drs. Jo Baker and Mike Ruohoniemi. He has published in leading journals on topics as varied as reconnection dynamics, subauroral electric fields, and the prediction of auroral substorm onset using machine learning techniques. The title of his dissertation is 'Driving Influences of Ionospheric Electrodynamics at Mid- and High-Latitudes'. While working towards his doctoral degree Muhammad also earned a dual M.A. in Data Analysis & Applied Statistcs from the Department of Statistics.

Congratulations, Muhammad!

At the 2019 NSF CEDAR Workshop Muhammad won a poster prize in the MLT category (pictured).

Duration: June 19-25, 2020
Location: NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia

Open to: US Citizens and Permanent Residents
Application Deadline: 30 April 2020
Apply Through: http://tinyurl.com/2020RockOn

How it works: You register to participate and, when selected, you are invited to stay in scenic Chincoteague, Virginia (next to the Wallops Flight Facility) for the duration of the program, assembling and then flying a rocket payload as part of a team of rocketeers.Teams of 3 build a sounding rocket payload from a kit in three days and launch it into space on the sixth day. Since 2008, 702 people have participated in the RockOn workshops and successfully built and launched 226 payloads to space. The hardware in the kit may be used on future RockSat (and possibly CubeSat) flights. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility will again be providing the rocket (two stage Terrier-Orion) and launch operations during the 2020 workshop. This hands-on workshop is about learning to build sounding rocket payloads, not rockets. RockOn is supported by the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant programs with significant cost sharing from Wallops and NASA Education. The registration for the 2020 RockOn workshop, is $909 if your register by March 6, 2020 ($999 after), which includes kit hardware (that teams take home), breakfast and lunch each day plus one dinner, t-shirt, handbook, software, and more plus a priceless experience. For more information on the workshop, please visit the website.

Shibaji Chakraborty successfully sat his PhD Preliminary Exam on Wednesday, November 13 before a committee of seven professors. Shibaji has authored and co-authored papers that focus on the impacts of solar flares on the ionosphere, in particular, the effects of the ionization enhancement that leads to shortwave fadeout (SWF). This is the fastest form of space weather felt by Earth with only an 8 min delay for propagation of enhanced X-ray and EUV radiation from the sun. Shibaji is currently developing a model that incorporates the physis and chemistry that are needed to account for HF absorption in the ionospheric D region during geomagnetic disturbances. He now passes into PhD Candidate status.

Congratulations, Shibaji!

Photo credit: Muhammad Maimaiti

As reported by the University of Scranton and the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), Virginia Tech alumnus Nathaniel Frissell has won a $1.3 million, 3-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study weather effects in the ionosphere by leveraging a network of amateur radio stations as a Distributed Arrays of Small Instruments (DASI) project. Principal investigator Frissell will head a collaborative team that will develop ground-based space science observation instruments and software. His research effort will recruit multiple universities and radio amateurs to operate a network of personal space weather stations.

Nathaniel initiated his studies of space weather with amateur radio networks as a graduate student with the SuperDARN HF radar group at Virginia Tech where he graduated in 2016. Recently he has begun a faculty position at the University of Scranton after holding positions at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The University of Scranton news item can be found at https://news.scranton.edu/articles/2019/11/news-faculty-nsfgrant-frissell.shtml

Congratulations to Nathaniel on this success from his advisors and colleagues at Virginia Tech!

Photo credit: The University of Scranton 'Royal News'