Welcome to Dimitris Vassiliadis' Homepage

I am a research associate professor at the Department of Physics at West Virginia University, in Morgantown, WV, and a member of Prof. Mark Koepke's plasma physics group (WVUQ group).

My research interests are in plasma physics (space and, increasingly, lab) and in the continuum between applied math, systems engineering, and applications. In space physics, I have spent the last few years working on modeling Earth's space environment, or geospace, and its subdivisions: the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and the near-Earth interplanetary medium, or solar wind. The inner magnetosphere poses several unsolved theoretical and practical questions related to particle acceleration and transport in its radiation belts.

Spacecraft missions such as  NASA's POLAR and SAMPEX and powerful computer simulations have enabled us to model several of these effects. To better understand space plasma physics and predict space weather, NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probes will focus exclusively on the radiation belt dynamics (expected launch: 2012). The new STEREO observations of the Sun and its solar wind are crucial in understanding how these powerful complex structures arise at the solar surface and how they propagate to Earth's orbit and interact with our planet (launch: October 2006).

In the inner magnetosphere, its radiation belts are a fascinating part of geospace whose study languished in the 70s and 80s only to come to the forefront since the mid-1990s. Changes in the radiation belts and other parts of geospace have significant effects on human-made structures in space and on the ground. The effects are collectively called space weather and part of the challenge is, in addition to understanding their physics, to develop accurate forecasts for them well in advance. Currently I am working on the physics of the belts' responses to geoeffective interplanetary structures such as coronal mass ejections and high-speed streams.

The outer magnetosphere has for a long time caught the attention of space plasma physicists probably much more so that the inner region. There is an ongoing effort focused on the geospace's large-scale reconfigurations, which are magnetospheric substorms and magnetic storms. Continuing an earlier research line, I am also working on solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling to represent such phenomena as well as other less dramatic events. Part of this effort is in developing a real-time geomagnetic field model.