Space Science Institute

Please join us in welcoming Konstantinos Horaites, an Affiliate Research Scientist. Welcome to the SSI team! Below is Kosta's bio on their field and specialty.

"I am a physicist specializing in the dynamics of plasmas---the charged particles and electromagnetic fields that suffuse outer space. I am also active in the burgeoning research area of "space weather". This is the study of how the Sun can launch plasma across the Solar System, that ultimately influences the Earth's environment and adversely impacts our society's infrastructure. Technologies that can be disrupted or damaged by space weather events include satellites, telecommunications, and even the electrical power grid. I work with satellite observations, theoretical models, and computer simulations to describe the plasma's evolution and interactions.

I received my PhD in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019). I then held postdoctoral appointments with the MAVEN satellite team at LASP in Boulder, CO and the Vlasiator simulation group at the University of Helsinki in Finland. In 2024, I returned to Boulder to work as a researcher in the magnetometer team at CIRES, CU-Boulder, in support of scientific instruments on NOAA's satellite missions. I was awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, to study space weather using kinetic simulations at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK, starting in 2026. I joined SSI with great excitement in 2025, continuing this diverse scientific journey."