Dr Wu, Pin (Penny)

My research concerns ionised gas, so-called plasmas (or star dust), more than 99% of the visible (thus excludes dark matter) universe and the 4th state of matter in the “solid-liquid-gas-plasma” hierarchy. Plasmas are electrically conducting and magnetically carrying, and make up a highly non-linear many-body system which often requires a multi-scale kinetic treatment to go beyond fluid descriptions.

    Combining state-of-the-art particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations (see an example of my computation, also here, both sites by Professor William H. Matthaeus), analytic methods, and space observations, I have studied, three fundamental dissipative processes that heat plasmas: collisionless shocks, magnetic reconnection, and turbulence (see Refereed Publications). Each project received funds from a NASA mission − the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, the Magnetospheric Multiscale, and the Parker Solar Probe, respectively − to facilitate a space exploration.

    Through my academic career, mostly in the States, I have been on various NASA , NSF, and DOE panels and have been a regular referee for international scientific journals and book publishers such as Physical Review Letters, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Astrophysical Journal, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, Advances in Space Research, AIP Proceedings, and Taylor & Francis CRC Press.

I attended the 3:31AM launch of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft as a NASA invited guest on August 12, 2018 at the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida.