Biography

Christina Cohen is a visiting research collaborator at Princeton University.  She is a research scientist at the Space Radiation Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  Dr. Cohen has served on numerous committees for NASA, NSF, and the National Academy of Science (NAS), including the NAS Committee on Solar and Space Physics, the NSF Geospace Section Portfolio Review Committee, and the NASA Living With a Star (LWS) Steering Committee.  She is currently co-chair of the Space Weather Science and Applications Panel of the Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics and was recently chair of the NASA LWS Architecture Committee.  Dr. Cohen was the Editor for Space Physics for the AGU publication Eos for nearly 10 years, served as AGU Space Physics and Aeronomy Section President, and is currently one of the Deans of NASA’s Heliophysics Summer School.  Dr. Cohen has received several NASA achievement awards for involvement in the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), Wind, and Ulysses missions, as well as the Silver Medal for contributions to the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission.

Research Interests

Christina Cohen studies the variation of characteristics of solar energetic particle and energetic storm particle events as a function of time, solar longitude, and radial distance using a variety of data from space-based missions.  These events are one aspect of space weather and understanding their acceleration and transport is key to developing a capability for accurately predicting space weather hazards. Dr. Cohen has previously studied the characteristics of heavy ions in the Jovian magnetosphere using data from the Galileo spacecraft and the composition of the solar wind using data from the Ulysses spacecraft.  She has been awarded over 20 grants from NASA and NSF and is currently a Co-I on the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe missions; Deputy PI for the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun on PSP and for the Low Energy Telescope on STEREO; and PI for the Solar Isotope Spectrometer and Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer on ACE.