MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

Latest news

Announcement of New MIST Councillors.

We are very pleased to announce the following members of the community have been elected unopposed to MIST Council:

  • Rosie Johnson (Aberystwyth University), MIST Councillor
  • Matthew Brown (University of Birmingham), MIST Councillor
  • Chiara Lazzeri (MSSL, UCL), Student Representative

Rosie, Matthew, and Chiara will begin their terms in July. This will coincide with Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, and Sophie Maguire outgoing as Councillors.

The current composition of Council can be found on our website, and this will be amended in July to reflect this announcement (https://www.mist.ac.uk/community/mist-council).

Nominations are open for MIST Council

We are very pleased to open nominations for MIST Council. There are three positions available (detailed below), and elected candidates would join Georgios Nicolaou, Andy Smith, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Emma Woodfield on Council. The nomination deadline is Friday 31 May.

Council positions open for nomination

2 x MIST Councillor - a three year term (2024 - 2027). Everyone is eligible.

MIST Student Representative - a one year term (2024 - 2025). Only PhD students are eligible. See below for further details.

About being on MIST Council

If you would like to find out more about being on Council and what it can involve, please feel free to email any of us (email contacts below) with any of your informal enquiries! You can also find out more about MIST activities at mist.ac.uk. Two of our outgoing councillors, Beatriz and Sophie, have summarised their experiences being on MIST Council below.

Beatriz Sanchez-Cano (MIST Councillor):

"Being part of the MIST council for the last 3 years has been a great experience personally and professionally, in which I had the opportunity to know better our community and gain a larger perspective of the matters that are important for the MIST science progress in the UK. During this time, I’ve participated in a number of activities and discussions, such as organising the monthly MIST seminars, Autumn MIST meetings, writing A&G articles, and more importantly, being there to support and advise our colleagues in cases of need together with the wonderful council members. MIST is a vibrant and growing community, and the council is a faithful reflection of it."

Sophie Maguire (MIST Student Representative):

"Being the student representative for MIST council has been an amazing experience. I have been part of organizing conferences, chairing sessions, and writing grant applications based on the feedback MIST has received. From a wider perspective, MIST has helped to grow and support my professional networks which in turn, directly benefits my PhD work as well. I would encourage any PhD student to apply for the role of MIST Student Representative and I would be happy to answer any questions or queries you have about the role."

How to nominate

If you would like to stand for election or you are nominating someone else (with their agreement!) please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 31 May. If there is a surplus of nominations for a role, then an online vote will be carried out with the community. Please include the following details in the nomination:

  1. Name
  2. Position (Councillor/Student Rep.)
  3. Nomination Statement (150 words max including a bit about the nominee and focusing on your reasons for nominating. This will be circulated to the community in the event of a vote.)

MIST Council details

  • Sophie Maguire, University of Birmingham, Earth's ionosphere - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Georgios Nicolaou, MSSL, solar wind plasma - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, University of Leicester, Mars plasma - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, University of Leicester, Earth’s inner magnetosphere - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Andy Smith, Northumbria University, Space Weather - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Maria-Theresia Walach, Lancaster University, Earth’s ionosphere - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Emma Woodfield, British Antarctic Survey, radiation belts - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • MIST Council email - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Winners of Rishbeth Prizes 2023

We are pleased to announce that following Spring MIST 2023 the Rishbeth Prizes this year are awarded to Sophie Maguire (University of Birmingham) and Rachel Black (University of Exeter).

Sophie wins the prize for the best MIST student talk which was entitled “Large-scale plasma structures and scintillation in the high-latitude ionosphere”. Rachel wins the best MIST poster prize, for a poster entitled “Investigating different methods of chorus wave identification within the radiation belts”. Congratulations to both Sophie and Rachel!

As prize winners, Sophie and Rachel will be invited to write articles for Astronomy & Geophysics, which we look forward to reading.

MIST Council extends their thanks to the University of Birmingham for hosting the Spring MIST meeting 2023, and to the Royal Astronomical Society for their generous and continued support of the Rishbeth Prizes.

Nominations for MIST Council

We are pleased to open nominations for MIST Council. There are two positions available (detailed below), and elected candidates would join Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Andy Smith, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Emma Woodfield on Council. The nomination deadline is Friday 26 May.

Council positions open for nomination

  • MIST Councillor - a three year term (2023 - 2026). Everyone is eligible.
  • MIST Student Representative - a one year term (2023 - 2024). Only PhD students are eligible. See below for further details.

About being on MIST Council


If you would like to find out more about being on Council and what it can involve, please feel free to email any of us (email contacts below) with any of your informal enquiries! You can also find out more about MIST activities at mist.ac.uk.

Rosie Hodnett (current MIST Student Representative) has summarised their experience on MIST Council below:
"I have really enjoyed being the PhD representative on the MIST council and would like to encourage other PhD students to nominate themselves for the position. Some of the activities that I have been involved in include leading the organisation of Autumn MIST, leading the online seminar series and I have had the opportunity to chair sessions at conferences. These are examples of what you could expect to take part in whilst being on MIST council, but the council will welcome any other ideas you have. If anyone has any questions, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..”

How to nominate

If you would like to stand for election or you are nominating someone else (with their agreement!) please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 26 May. If there is a surplus of nominations for a role, then an online vote will be carried out with the community. Please include the following details in the nomination:
  • Name
  • Position (Councillor/Student Rep.)
  • Nomination Statement (150 words max including a bit about the nominee and your reasons for nominating. This will be circulated to the community in the event of a vote.)
 
MIST Council contact details

Rosie Hodnett - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mathew Owens - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Beatriz Sanchez-Cano - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Jasmine Kaur Sandhu - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Andy Smith - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Maria-Theresia Walach - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Emma Woodfield - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
MIST Council email - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

RAS Awards

The Royal Astronomical Society announced their award recipients last week, and MIST Council would like to congratulate all that received an award. In particular, we would like to highlight the following members of the MIST Community, whose work has been recognised:
  • Professor Nick Achilleos (University College London) - Chapman Medal
  • Dr Oliver Allanson (University of Birmingham) - Fowler Award
  • Dr Ravindra Desai (University of Warwick) - Winton Award & RAS Higher Education Award
  • Professor Marina Galand (Imperial College London) - James Dungey Lecture

A week at an International Conference: MOP 2019

by Omakshi Agiwal

Omakshi Agiwal is a second year PhD student at Imperial College London, researching the variability in Saturn’s field-aligned current systems. In this blog post Omakshi reports back from a busy week at the Magnetospheres of Outer Planets (MOP) 2019 conference.

What is MOP?

The MOP conference brings together researchers who are interested in the physical processes that control the magnetospheres of the four giant planets (and some moons!) for a week long discussion once every two years. It’s a summer-time conference and hosted at a different institution each time – this year, it was held in Sendai, Japan.

This is the second international conference that I have attended during my PhD, and there were three other PhD students from Imperial who were also attending, all of us having been awarded talks! We arrived in Sendai two nights in advance to try and beat the jet-lag (and get some exploring in) and ran into a few other MIST colleagues at the airport who had the same idea! While this does dial up the expenses a little, it also meant that I was significantly more awake during the Monday morning session than I would have been otherwise.

Sunday: Breaking the Ice

There is usually a drinks reception on Sunday evenings at MOP, since most people arrive the night before to be able to make the 9am Monday morning start. Although there was no official reception this year, we ran into others at registration and ended up hanging out anyway! We found a nice bar near campus where we marvelled about Japan and complained about our jet lag. MOP is a fairly tight-knit community seeing as it is quite small as far as conferences go (155 attended this year, 34 students), so this was a great chance to catch up with familiar faces and meet new people in a more informal setting before the conference officially began! I found that a few people had been in Japan for almost a week at this point since they had taken some time before the conference to travel around, which is something my colleagues and I were going to do after the conference instead!

Meeting old and new people at the "ice breaker".

Monday: JUNO Kicks Things Off

The structure of each day was fairly similar with 4 main science sessions each day. Unlike larger conferences, there are no parallel sessions at MOP, so you don’t run the risk of clashes between sessions that you are interested in.

The science focus of the day was auroral observations from JUNO, a Jupiter-orbiter which aims to complete 32 orbits around the gas giant over one year. For many of us who aren’t directly involved in Jupiter-related science, it was our first look at data from the active mission – and it was very cool! There were a good mix of speakers, ranging from Instrument Principle Investigators to PhD students, who were all working with new data and addressing open questions, which got a lot of interesting discussions going within the group. Many of the talks in the schedule for the rest of the week were also given by PhD students (at least one or two per session!) which allowed newer members of the community to introduce themselves and present their work. This definitely made many of the sessions much more accessible for me, and made it easier to start conversations with people I hadn’t met before during coffee breaks (‘Nice talk!’ or a question about someone’s work is always a great conversation starter). 

Dinner with MIST colleagues.

Tuesday: Time for my Talk!

The lack of parallel sessions at MOP can seem both a blessing and a curse. Despite it being only the second day of the conference, I decided to sit-out a couple of the morning talks to go over my presentation, which was shortly after the morning coffee break. Something I picked up over the rest of the week too, was that it’s OK to skip sessions if you think you want to get some work done or need some down time. Over the rest of the week many others dropped in and out of sessions, had a lie in, or went for a walk during coffee breaks, because spending the whole day absorbing information and being surrounded by people can become very exhausting.  

My talk focussed on results from the Cassini Grand Finale and a newly discovered low-latitude field-aligned current system at Saturn – and thankfully, minus a few mic-related mishaps – it went well! During the coffee break, I was asked lots of interesting questions about my work, and our discussion spilled over into part of the afternoon session, where white-board and laptops quickly became involved. This was probably my favourite part about MOP; not the skipping of the sessions, of course, but having all the experts within the field in one place. I was able to speak directly to people with whom I usually only interact via a screen, and get some really useful input on the work that I am doing which is much easier in person!

I found that coffee breaks and poster sessions were a great time to find people to ask them about their work, or to ask for their input on yours. I usually tried to avoid work-talk during lunch and generally found that other people liked to do the same.

With my talk out of the way, I was half ready to fall asleep straight after the poster session that evening – but also more willing to socialise than I had been the night before. Whilst talking with various people at the poster session, I joined some dinner plans for Shabu Shabu (a hot-pot style dish where you cook all-you-can-eat meats and veg in two types of broth and then add noodles to the broth to soak up the flavours and finish it off nicely). Since most of the other students from Imperial still had their talks to come, I ended up with a completely different group of people for dinner than Monday night, with people whose names I knew from papers but could finally put a face to!

A snapshot of my talk!

Wednesday: More Science and More Socialising

The Science focus of the day was observations made by Hisaki, a UV astronomy satellite, in conjunction with JUNO, and magnetospheric structure and plasma physics at Jupiter and Saturn. A conference like this was a great opportunity to see the collaborations between different teams in the same room (there were also many comparisons with observations from the Hubble Space Telescope in other sessions!). 

In the evening, a large group of us decided to go out for dinner together and ended up at a ramen bar where we had to order our food using buttons on a vending machine (which quickly turned into a game of mystery food orders). After dinner, some of us moved on to find some celebratory drinks, whereas others went home to try and catch up on sleep because the jet lag had led to some sleepless nights. Most of us out that night had already given our talks and I found that socialising informally was a great way to switch off my work-brain, which could sometimes be difficult when the entire day was spent in science-mode. We found a great bar that we filled out to capacity (everything in Japan is very small…) run by a single guy, who gave us free snacks, taught us a few Japanese phrases, and had us supporting the Sendai baseball team before the night was through!

Ramen!Socialising at the bar.

Thursday: Matsushima, a Japanese Banquet, and Karaoke!

Whilst the morning focused on the moons of the outer planets, in the afternoon we had the conference excursion to Matsushima, a nearby costal city. We went for lunch; some tea and mochi with a beautiful seaside view, followed by a boat ride around the bay organised by the MOP committee in Japan, and then visited a temple. I spent my free time at the island wandering into shops and being offered free snacks by many vendors, before heading back for the conference banquet. The banquet was at a traditional sit-down style Japanese restaurant, where there was a lot of Japanese food and many more speeches. The evening then ended (or began?) with 45 people from the conference (almost a third!) doing Karaoke in a private room. We started at 10pm and I’m not quite sure when the night ended. It was an incredibly fun night, but I wouldn’t advise staying out that late any earlier in the week – lack of sleep and early mornings are never a good combination!

The MOP 2019 banquet feat. sake!Karaoke with colleaguesTaking a break during the excursion with some tea and mochiOn the excursion!

Friday: The Science Ends and the Holiday Begins

The final day of the conference was also a half day. The morning sessions covered magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling and general magnetospheric dynamics. Many people headed back home either that evening or the next day from Sendai, while others (me) caught up on some much needed sleep on Friday to prepare for the upcoming holidays that we had booked!

Overall, MOP 2019 was a fantastic experience, but conferences (especially international conferences with travel and jet lag thrown in) are intense! It’s easy to get both mentally and physically exhausted, and from this experience I’ve learnt how important it is to take time out when you need: either by skipping a talk for a walk outside; arriving an extra day or two before the conference; or organising a holiday afterwards to recover from all the science!

Intense science discussion...?Scenic sightseeing viewsExploring Japan with friends

The MOP 2019 attendees!

 

If you have any more questions about Omakshi’s experience at MOP 2019, then you can This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Information about MOP meetings and how to subscribe to the MOP announcement mailing list can be found here: http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/mop/resources/mop-conference/