Meers Oppenheim

Meers Oppenheim (born 1962, Bethesda, Maryland) is an American physicist who is Professor of Astronomy at Boston University. His primary research interests include computational and theoretical space plasma physics, dynamics of the ionosphere and solar atmosphere, particle-wave interactions in plasmas, and the physics of meteor trails.

Education Oppenheim received his B.S. and M.Eng. in 1984 and 1990 from Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics. He then received his Ph.D. of Electrical Engineering in 1995 from Cornell's Space Plasma Physics Group.

Career Oppenheim began his career as a programmer and junior analyst at Jack Faucett Associates, Inc. in Chevy Chase, Maryland from 1980 to 1982. From 1984 to 1986, he worked as a staff physicist at the Physics International Corporation in San Leandro, California.

In 1988, Oppenheim was a research assistant at Cornell University. In 1995, he became a Max Planck Society Postdoctoral Scientist. In 1996, he became a research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In 1998, Oppenheim began working as an assistant professor of astronomy at Boston University. He became an associate professor in 2004, and in 2013, a full professor. In 2018, he became the director of graduate admissions at Boston University.

Scientific contributions Oppenheim studies space plasma physics using supercomputer simulations, theory, and data. He works on a range of research topics, including ionospheric and solar collisional plasmas, particle-wave interactions, and the physics of meteor trails. Since 2016, he has been working to incorporate the important effects of ionospheric turbulence into planetary scale simulations of the coupled magnetosphere, ionosphere and atmosphere. He has also been trying to model wave heating of the solar chromosphere. Most recently, he has also been working on understanding the effects of UV photoelectrons on the ionosphere and their observational consequences.

Honors and awards 1988–1989: Reily scholar 1994: CEDAR conference honorable mention 1994: Spring AGU meeting outstanding student paper 1995–1996: Max Planck Society Fellowship 1996: National Research Council Fellowship 2001: Elected member, Union Radio Science International 2002–2005: Elected Vice-Chair, Union Radio Science International 2003–2005: Member, American Physical Science, Division of Plasma Physics, program committee 2006–present: Elected Chair, Union Radio Science International, U.S.A. Commission H 2008–2011: Elected member, CEDAR Science Steering Committee 2011–2014: Elected Vice-Chair, Union Radio Science International, International Commission H 2016: CEDAR Prize Lecturer 2018: Visiting Scholar and Professor, Leibniz-Institut f ̈ur Atmosph ̈arenphysik, Kuhlungsborn, Germany Member of the American Geophysical Union Member of the American Physical Society Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Selected publications