Barbara June Thompson is an American solar physicist. She is a scientist at

Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC empl ...

where she researches coronal mass ejections and the dynamics of coronal structures. Thompson was the project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory mission through development and early flight.

Education

Thompson completed a B.A. in physics and mathematics with a minor in geology at University of Pennsylvania in 1991. In 1996, she earned a Ph.D. in physics from University of Minnesota. Her dissertation was titled ''The role of inertial Alfvén waves in auroral particle acceleration''.

Career

She is a scientist working as a

civil servant The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leaders ...

at NASA's

. SOHO/EIT observations of an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection on May 12, 1997, Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 14 (1998). She was a major organizer of the global

International Heliophysical Year The International Heliophysical Year is a UN-sponsored scientifically driven international program of scientific collaboration to understand external drivers of planetary environments and universal processes in solar-terrestrial- planetary- helio ...

effort to study external drivers of planetary environments (including Earth's).United Nations publication "Putting the 'I' in IHY" by Thompson, Gopalswamy, Davila & Haubold, 2009
/ref> Thompson was the project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory mission through development and early flight, The Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar Physics 275, 3 (2012). and continues to hold a major role in that mission, while conducting ongoing research into CME onset and propagation. She was a founder of the NASA Center for HelioAnalytics, focusing on Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI methods to advance scientific research.

Research

She is noted for wide-ranging contributions to the study of eruptive phenomena in the solar corona, beginning with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission in the 1990s. Early work included EUV imaging studies of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and their aftermath, including discovery of a global coronal wave response to the launch of CMEs (" EIT waves"). The majority of Thompson's solar research focuses on the study of coronal mass ejections and the dynamics of coronal structures. Her refereed publications often involve either CMEs or eruption-associated phenomena, such as dimmings and EUV waves. Her research efforts focus on understanding the dynamics of the solar corona and image processing/analysis efforts to examine eruptive structures, and the application of machine learning and advance mathematical methods to problem-solving. Her current research efforts focus on using machine learning and data analytics to address NASA big data challenges. Her scientific leadership has emphasized cross-disciplinary development and innovation, including the establishment of the new Center for HelioAnalytics, a center for machine learning and neural net heliophysics at NASA Goddard.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson, Barbara J. 1969 births Living people American astrophysicists University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni University of Pennsylvania alumni 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists American women astrophysicists NASA people NASA astrophysicists 20th-century American women scientists 21st-century American women scientists