Leo Enright meets Irish space scientist Dr. Caitriona Jackman
Dr. Caitriona Jackman obtained a BSc in Applied Physics from the University of Limerick in 2003 and a PhD in Planetary Physics from the University of Leicester in 2006. She has held research positions at Imperial College London, and two consecutive fellowships (Leverhulme Trust and Royal Astronomical Society) at University College London. She moved to the University of Southampton in 2013, where she has held a Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Ernest Rutherford Fellowship to study planetary and stellar magnetospheres. She is a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. At the heart of her research is Space Plasma Physics in our solar system and beyond. She is an expert in planetary magnetospheres, the magnetic bubbles which surround magnetised planets. She has worked with data from missions including NASA’s Cassini at Saturn, ESA’s Cluster mission in orbit around Earth, NASA’s Juno at Jupiter, and with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Her research interests include understanding how the aurora works, and how machine learning and complexity science can be used to study huge volumes of data from space.