Marit Oieroset is a Research Physicist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory where she has been since 1998. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo, Department of Physics and was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland. Dr. Oieroset specializes in the studies of the interactions between the solar wind and the Earth’s and planetary magnetospheres, processes that ultimately provide the energy supply for the aurora. More specifically, she studies large-scale and microphysical properties of magnetic reconnection, an energy conversion process important in space and astrophysical contexts.

In her 2001 Nature paper she reported the first in-situ satellite observations of the reconnection diffusion region. Her work has been reported in Physics Today (October 2001) and quoted in The New York Times (October 24, 2000). In 2008 she was awarded the Prix Baron Nicolet by the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences for her work on magnetic reconnection.

CV: https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/~oieroset/cv.html