Gasparini Sara

Sara Gasparini holds a Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Technology from the University of Turin and a Master’s degree in Physics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

In 2020, she began her PhD in Space Physics at the University of Bergen, focusing on the interaction between the Sun and the Earth, specifically on auroras within the solar system. She spent part of her doctoral studies, which she recently completed, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, initiating numerous collaborations, including one with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

Her research focuses on magnetic reconnection and field-aligned currents, two fundamental aspects of the Sun-Earth interaction. To obtain global patterns of ionospheric electrodynamics her work involves data assimilation using various data types, such as radar measurements of ionospheric convection velocity, magnetic field data, and global auroral images from NASA’s IMAGE satellite. Furthermore, she developed a new method for comparing data with models, being able to compare results derived from real-world data against those from global numerical simulations of the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere based on the MAGE model, which was developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

She is part of the Synergies and Additional Science Working Group for the ESA’s Plasma Observatory (PO) mission. She is currently co-leading a research group at the International Space Science Institute in Bern.