Rumi Nakamura - Biography#

Rumi Nakamura got her PhD degree in geophysics from the University of Tokyo 1990. After a year as a Research Associate at National Polar Research Institute in Tokyo, she worked 1991-1993 as a Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. During 1993-1998 she was an Assistant Professor at the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory of Nagoya University. In 1998 she started as Senior Scientist at Max-Planck-Insitut für extraterrestrische Physik, after which she moved to her present position as the Magnetospheric physics Group Leader at the Institut für Weltraumforschung in Graz 2001. Rumi Nakamura habilitated for the title of Privatdozent from Kaiser-Franzens-Universität 2010.

Rumi Nakamura has made a remarkable career in studies of magnetospheric plasma physics, and she has become one of the most prominent scientists in analysis of space plasma observations, most notable from ESA’s 4-satellite constellation Cluster. She has made important contributions to the understanding of magnetospheric phenomena related to auroral substorms. In particular, her studies of bursty plasma flows in the nightside magnetosphere and their relationship to rapid dipolarization of the elongated magnetic field configuration at the time of auroral breakups have left a lasting trace in the magnetospheric literature, as illustrated by her having been among 1% of the most cited geophysicists in the ISI WoS database during 1997-2007.

Through her excellent network of European, American, Japanese, Russian and Chinese space researchers she has used data from a large number of European, US and Japanese spacecraft (e.g. Cluster, Equator-S, SAMPEX, GEOTAIL several geostationary satellites) and ground-based ionospheric facilities.

Recently Rumi Nakamura has become actively involved in the data analysis of NASA’s MMS mission. She is presently a science co-investigator in ESA’s mission to Mercury (BepiColombo, launched 2018) and to Jupiter (JUICE, scheduled for launch 2022).