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Awesome Alum: Dr. Sarah K. Vines and Dr. Robert C. Allen
By Amber Powell
After initially meeting through a friend at an academic conference in Colorado, Dr. Sarah K. Vines and Dr. Robert C. Allen returned to their respective graduate programs but stayed in touch. Vines had just finished her first year in UTSA’s physics Ph.D. program, and Allen had recently wrapped up his second year of the physics graduate program at the University of New Hampshire.
After Allen moved to San Antonio several months later to start the same program, life was never the same.
“It was pretty quick that we realized we would always be more than just colleagues,” Vines said. “We had fallen in love before Robert even made it down that fall, and ended up getting married three years later, right before my dissertation defense in the fall of 2016. What a crazy year!”
Vines earned her Ph.D. in 2016, and Allen completed his in 2017.
“The UTSA/SwRI Ph.D. program set me up because it focused on real-world applicable skills such as proposal and paper writing, Allen said. “This enabled me to win the first science grant proposal I ever wrote, as well as graduate with six first-authored publications and several co-authorships to allow my name to be known to the community. It allowed for a much less stressful interview process, as those who were interviewing me and considering my application for a postdoctoral fellowship were already aware of my work.”
Allen is now the instrument scientist of the Suprathermal Ion Spectrograph on the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter mission and is a member of the NASA Parker Solar Probe project science team. He is responsible for advancing scientific understanding of the solar wind and how charged particles are energized in interplanetary space through peer-reviewed scientific publications.
He also prepares the instrument data for disbursement to the broader scientific community. Additionally, Allen organizes opportunities for joint instrument and multi-mission observations of interesting solar wind events.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to take advantage of these really amazing opportunities to be on the ground floor of some of the most exciting missions of our time,” he said. “We’re going to be able to transform our understanding of how the solar wind is generated and how ions in the solar wind reach really high energies in a region of space that we only now have the technology to really explore.”
Vines is currently the deputy principal investigator of the Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment (AMPERE) where she studies Birkeland currents. Birkeland currents are a vital part of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction that drive energy into the ionosphere and neutral upper atmosphere.
“AMPERE is a pretty awesome project in that it uses commercial magnetometers carried by each one of the Iridium Communication Network satellites to back out signatures of large electric currents in the near-Earth space environment that close through the ionosphere, the ionized portion of the Earth’s upper atmosphere,” she said. “Basically, we’re using non-science tools to do some really great science that is only enabled by such a large fleet of spacecraft that make up the Iridium constellation.”
