Mei-Ching Fok

Mei-Ching Hannah Fok is a research space physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2011 and elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2019. She has worked on the IMAGE, Van Allen Probes and TWINS missions.

Early life and education Fok earned her bachelor's in physics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and earned her diploma in education in 1984.

Fok developed the Comprehensive Inner Magnetosphere–Ionosphere model (CIMI), a bounce-averaged kinetic model that can calculate the plasma fluxes within the ring current regions of the radiation belt. Fok's CIMI model is currently being used to predict the fluxes observed by the Van Allen Probes. CIMI takes in information about magnetic fields, electric potentials, quiet-time conductances and solar wind speed, and outputs information about ion fluxes, plasmasphere density and ionospheric potentials. Fok was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for her development of CIMI. Her citation read: "For creation of state-of-the-art numerical models that account for the complex couplings between the solar wind, radiation belts, ring current, ionosphere and magnetosphere".

Alongside creating the CIMI model, Fok works on Neutral Atom Imaging, and her modelling tools were used in both the IMAGE and TWINS missions.

Selected publications Her publications include;