Dimitris Vassiliadis is the SWFO Scientist for the SWFO Program. In this role, he is the link between the operational space weather user community and the SWFO program office for the SWFO data products. Vassiliadis joined the SWFO team in 2018, and is currently the SWFO scientist and acting lead of the Product Generation and Distribution (PGD) element.
Prior to joining NOAA, Vassiliadis was a research scientist with NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center for 15 years. His research focused on the Earth’s magnetosphere, with topics ranging from solar wind-magnetosphere coupling, to the geomagnetic and ionospheric response to geoeffective structures such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), to electron transport and acceleration in the radiation belts. He worked on data analysis, simulations, and predictive models with missions such as ACE, WIND, SAMPEX, POLAR, VAP, and several GOES satellites. He has more than 90 publications with more than 1500 citations. He has organized special sessions in conferences and workshops and edited proceedings in journal volumes and books.
After several years of research, he started teaching, initially at the University of Maryland and later at West Virginia University, Frostburg State University, and Washington and Jefferson College. He has advised three Ph.D. and many undergraduate students, and has led several eight undergraduate teams in developing science payloads for sounding rocket flights launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in participation in the RockSat programs. He had two space science experiments on the STF-1 cubesat, a mission built by NASA’s Katherine Johnson IV&V facility and WVU, launched in December of 2018, and operational for more than five years.
Vassiliadis obtained his undergraduate degree at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and an M.S. and a Ph.D., all in physics, from the University of Maryland.