Welcome, Kris Klein

Welcome, Kris Klein

This fall, Dr. Kristopher Klein joined the LPL faculty as an Assistant Professor. Professor Klein earned a Ph.D. in Physics in 2013 from the University of Iowa, where he studied turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas (ionized gases) such as the solar wind. From 2014 to 2016, he worked at the University of New Hampshire as a National Science Foundation Atmospheric and Geospace Science Postdoctoral Research Fellow, constructing observational signatures for different turbulent heating mechanisms. In 2016, he moved to the University of Michigan to work on the science team preparing predictions for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission. This mission, which launched in August, will travel to within 4 million miles of the Sun's surface and reveal for the first time the mechanisms that lead to the solar wind's heating and acceleration. At LPL, Professor Klein continues to work on characterizing the transfer of energy from turbulent electromagnetic fields to plasma heat and the effects of such transfer on the solar wind and other collisionless plasmas, through analytic methods and large scale numerical simulations. He also is working on planning for the next generation of spacecraft that will help bring closure to these and other questions about our Sun and its extended atmosphere.