Multi-scale Structure Formation and Dynamics in Cosmic Plasmas

Prof. Andé Balogh is Distinguished Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College, London and the past Director of the International Space Science Institute of Bern, Switzerland. His main research interests are solar and heliospheric magnetic fields, solar activity phenomena and the nature of heliospheric turbulence. Prof. Balogh has been a Principal Investigator on the Ulysses and Cluster space missions and is author and co-author of over 500 scientific papers on solar physics, space research and planetary physics; as well as editor of ten books, including eight volumes in Springer's Space Sciences Series of ISSI. His recent research has covered the measurements of the Sun's magnetic flux and its dependence on the solar activity cycle. Andrei Bykov is head of the High Energy Astrophysics laboratory in the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences and professor of St.Petersburg State Politechnical University. His principal research interests are theory and observations of processes in astrophysical objects with extreme energy release - supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and clusters of galaxies. He is author and coauthor of over 200 scientific publications, a book Turbulence, Current Sheets and Shocks in Cosmic Plasma and editor of four books on high energy astrophysics. Jonathan Eastwood is a lecturer in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London where he is a member of the Space and Atmospheric Physics research group. He has previously worked at UC Berkeley and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2012 he was the recipient of the COSPAR Zeldovich medal (Commission D) in recognition of his research into the physics of magnetic reconnection and collisionless shocks using satellite data. Jelle Kaastra (PhD 1985, Utrecht University) is a senior scientist at SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research and professor of high-energy astrophysics at Leiden University. He is an expert on high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy of cosmic plasmas, and is currently principal investigator of the Reflection Grating Spectrometer on XMM-Newton and the Low-Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer on Chandra. He has an active track record on clusters of galaxies, active galactic nuclei and X-ray models for cosmic plasmas.