Minna Palmroth - Biography#

Minna Palmroth started her research career as a doctoral student at the space research unit of the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), Helsinki, in 1999, and got her PhD degree in Physics from the University of Helsinki 2003. She has held two highly competed positions of the Academy of Finland, first as post-doctoral researcher (2005-2008) and thereafter as Academy Research Fellow (2008-2013). 2011-2016 she was the head of the Earth Observation Department of FMI. In 2013 she was nominated Research Professor in space research at FMI. 1 January 2017 she became Professor in Computational Space Physics at the University of Helsinki where she currently is the Director of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research of Sustainable Space funded by the Academy of Finland.

Minna Palmroth’s research is focussed on dynamics of the near-Earth space due to the ever-changing solar wind, known as space weather. Her scientific publications deal with observations from both spacecraft and ground-based instruments, but most well-known she is as a developer of large-scale numerical simulation models and methods of analyzing the huge output data of such simulations. In her early career she used a magnetohydrodynamics simulation tool developed at FMI. Around year 2007 she started to develop a novel simulation facility based on kinetic approach solving the temporal evolution of plasma distributions functions in 6-dimensional position-velocity space called Vlasiator. For this development she has received two prestigious grants from the European Research Council (Starting Grant 2008-2013, Consolidator Grant 2016-2021). Vlasiator provides unprecedented possibilities to investigate the effects of small-scale turbulent phenomena on large-scale dynamical processes. This requires very large computer resources and Palmroth has been very successful in obtaining computing time from the large computing infrastructures, e.g. more than 168 million CPU hours form the Finnish Centre of Scientific Computing and more than 190 million CPU hours from Tier-0 projects of the European PRACE.