Emilia Kilpua - Biography#

Professor Emilia Kilpua received her PhD degree in theoretical physics (space plasma physics) from the University of Helsinki (UH) in 2005. During her PhD studies she made research visits to Max-Planck-Institute of Aeronomie in Katlenburg-Lindau, working with Dr. Rainer Schwenn on coronal mass ejections, and to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, working with Dr. James Slavin on the effects of solar wind shocks to the Earth's magnetosphere.

2005–2008 Emilia Kilpua worked as a post-doc at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, with Drs. Janet Luhman and Stuart Bale, analysing data from NASA’s Wind and STEREO spacecraft. She returned to Helsinki in 2008. Soon thereafter she gained a strongly competed Research Fellow position of the Academy of Finland. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant.

In 2015 Emilia Kilpua was appointed as a tenure-track Associate Professor and in 2020 full Professor in Space Physics at UH. She is currently the Head of the Doctoral Programme in particle physics and universe sciences at UH, a team leader in the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in Research of Sustainable Space (2018–2026), and the coordinator of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Training Network SWATNET (2021–2025).

Emilia Kilpua has about 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles (until 2008 with maiden name Huttunen) that have been cited about 6400 times, her ISI Wos h-index being 43. Her research activities cover a wide range of topics in solar-terrestrial physics including solar eruptions, coronal mass ejections in the interplanetary space, solar wind – magnetosphere interactions, Van Allen radiation belts, magnetospheric storms, and auroral phenomena. In 2023 Emilia Kilpua became the Principal investigator of the solar X-ray instrument onboard the BepiColombo spacecraft that will arrive to an orbit around planet Mercury in 2025.