Solène Lejosne is an Assistant Researcher at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, where she conducts research on the near-Earth space environment.

She grew up in the town of Givet, France. She received her bachelor’s degree from the École Polytechnique in Paris in 2008 and her PhD at University of Toulouse in 2013.

To date, most of Solène’s research has concentrated on reassessing plasma transport and energization in the Earth’s inner magnetosphere. Her thesis work focused on the understanding of radial diffusion, a process that is known to occur in the Earth’s radiation belts. Since 2014, she has worked at SSL to analyze measurements from the Van Allen Probes mission, putting the theoretical picture of radiation belt dynamics to the test.

Together with Forrest Mozer, she has demonstrated that the instruments on board the Van Allen Probes were accurate enough to deliver reliable electric drift measurements even very close to Earth. This has provided much-needed ground truth in a region of space historically deprived from in-situ electric field measurements. The analysis of this unique data set is ongoing. The first studies underscore the importance of ionospheric dynamics in understanding the variability of the electric drift measured close to Earth. This research effort is in line with the ongoing effort to describe the thermosphere/ionosphere/magnetosphere system, and with the UC Berkeley led Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission.

Keywords:

Science – Physics – Heliophysics – Magnetosphere – Ionosphere – Space Weather – Data Science