Heliophysics Summer School

NASA Living with a Star sponsors the Heliophysics Summer Schools, which are administered by the UCAR Visiting Scientist Programs. This series of summer schools helps graduate students and scientists learn and develop the science of heliophysics as a broad, coherent discipline that reaches in space from the Earth’s troposphere to the depths of the Sun, and in time from the formation of the solar system to the distant future.

After providing students with broad overviews of the solar atmosphere, the solar wind, the Earth¿s magnetosphere, and ionosphere, the course will cover the basic concepts and unanswered questions pertaining to magnetic reconnection, shocks, plasma instabilities, turbulence, and heating, and the manner in which these concepts and questions affect our understanding of phenomena such as substorms, radiation belt and chromospheric dynamics, solar wind turbulence and particle heating, and heliospheric shocks. The emphasis of the course will be on the quest for understanding and advancing heliophysical science that has inspired and motivated NASA missions.

Approximately 35 students will be selected through a competitive process organized by UCAR VSP. The school lasts for seven days, and each participant receives travel support for air travel, lodging and per diem costs.

Successful candidates are:
-Enrolled as a graduate student in any phase of training, or first or second year postdoctoral fellow, or beginning faculty in four-year liberal arts colleges.
-Majoring in physics with an emphasis on astrophysics, geophysics, plasma physics, and space physics, or experienced in at least one of these areas.
-Pursuing a career in heliophysics or astrophysics.