Dartmouth Engineering Researcher Receives Early Career Award

Evan Thomas, Research Scientist

Evan Thomas, former post-doc and current engineering research scientist at Dartmouth, has been awarded the "Basu United States Early Career Award for Research in Sun-Earth Systems Science" by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

The award is "for significant work that shows the focus and promise of making outstanding contributions to research in Sun-Earth systems science that further the understanding of both plasma physical processes and their applications for the benefit of society."

Thomas received his PhD in electrical engineering in 2016 from Virginia Tech where he studied how the plasma density in the Earth's ionosphere responds to drivers such as geomagnetic storms. Combining measurements from numerous distributed instruments, including the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), he was able to improve our understanding of how plasma in the polar ionosphere is created and transported—an important aspect of the coupling that occurs between the Earth's ionosphere and the solar wind (the ionized flow of particles continuously emitted by the Sun).

During his time in graduate school, Thomas developed collaborations with scientists, both domestic and international, which led to numerous presentations, publications and an NSF postdoctoral fellowship working with Dartmouth engineering professor Simon Shepherd.

Now an engineering research scientist at Dartmouth, Thomas has continued to foster his collaborations and is involved in numerous projects related to understanding the ionosphere-magnetosphere system using ground-based observations of various plasma properties.

He will be formally recognized at the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco this December.