Yu has graduated from ECE Illinois in 2019, with a M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His thesis, titled “ Decision tree application to satellite measurement and analysis of exospheric neutral densities”, explored the role of neutral dynamics in the evolution of ring current and the terrestrial magnetosphere as a whole. Yu is now building a career at Amazon Web Services as a Software Development Engineer, working to help enterprises in accelerating their adoption on cloud computing services.

Huizi graduated from ECE Illinois in 2021 with a M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research involved the development of an interactive 3D data visualization platform for space data applications, using measurements from the Cluster II satellite. Her motivation was to investigate the underlaying properties of space plasmas under various conditions, and to make the 3D data visualization platform accessible to the scientific community. During her last semester at ECE Illinois, Huizi won the Harold L. Olesen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Students for the 2020-2021 academic year. This award is given to recognize an outstanding effort in undergraduate teaching.

Outside of academics, Huizi is passionate about various forms of art, dancing, drawing, and photography, to discover the beauty of people and the world we live in. Currently, Huizi is pursuing a career at Amazon.

Mohamed received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Spring 2022. Prior to UIUC, he studied EE at the University of Texas at Dallas where he first took interest in electromagnetics and related circuit design. Mohamed’s research focused on understanding the neutral-ion dynamics in the near-earth plasma, using the Hot Electron-Ion Drift Integrator (HEIDI) model. He has started a career at Texas Instruments immediately after graduation.

Outside of academics, Mohamed enjoys playing soccer, coaching soccer, and visiting his home country of Algeria.

Chi received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2019 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His M.S. degree from ECE Illinois is on the development of the Hot Electron-Ion Drift Integrator (HEIDI) to investigate the effect of plasma composition on the development and decay of near Earth current systems.

Outside of academics, Chi likes running and hiking.

Jianghuai Liu received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2017, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Heliophysics Research and Application (HeRA) lab, where he is a graduate research assistant.

His research interests include developing first-principles numerical models that describe the plasma environment in the near-Earth space, and the associated numerical techniques that solve for the governing physics. His work includes the recent expansion of a kinetic ring current model, the Hot Electron-Ion Drift Integrator (HEIDI), by incorporating the inductive component of the electric field resulted from temporal change of magnetic field into the model, and assessing the associated effect on the kinetic evolution of all the ring current ion species.

His research goal is building realistic and self-consistent numerical models and frameworks that are able to capture details of the complicated inner magnetospheric plasma dynamics associated with the perturbation brought by the upstream solar wind shocks, and revealing information that is not easily captured by in-situ satellite observations through modeling techniques. Outside his academic interests, he also enjoys playing cards and basketball.

Mei-Yun is a Ph.D. candidate in the HeRA group within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Raluca Ilie. Her primary research focus is understanding the acceleration mechanisms responsible for ionospheric outflow, and its impacts on the magnetospheric dynamics.

Before coming to the United States for graduate school, Mei-Yun obtained a bachelor’s degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering from the National Taiwan University in Taiwan, where she is originally from. Through rigorous training at UIUC she quickly developed the skills to become an expert in numerical modeling, and in particular of ionospheric outflow models. She has been awarded the NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship in 2021, a fellowship that provides research grants to graduate students who are designing and performing research projects relevant to interests of the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Earth Sciences. This will allows Mei-Yun to continue her research on the contribution and the energization mechanisms of heavy ions in the polar wind.

Her work had also been recognized by the American Geophysical Union, where she was awarded the Outstanding Student Presentation Award in both 2019 and 2020, and Best Student Presentation Award at the Geospace Environmental Modeling Meeting in 2018. Recently, Mei-Yun has been the recipient of the Yuen T. Lo Outstanding Graduate Research Award for 2020-2021. This award is presented to a doctoral degree candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who has demonstrated excellence in research in the areas of electromagnetics or antennas.

In addition to research, Mei-Yun currently serves as the Student Representative of the NSF Geospace Environment Modeling Program. She was also selected to attend the 2021 MIT EECS Rising Stars workshop, an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs with underrepresented gender identities who are interested in pursuing academic careers.  In addition, Mei-Yun Lin has been selected as one of the Mavis Future Faculty Fellows (MF3) for the 2021-2022 academic year, a program designed to facilitate the training for the next generation of great engineering professors

Her long-term goal is to follow an academic path and become a professor, who will implement engineering skills to augment the accuracy and efficiency of space plasmas modeling.  Outside her scholarly activities, Mei-Yun enjoys driving (safely), gardening, baking, hiking and doing yoga. Read more about Mei-Yun here.

Soo Min received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.S.L.A.S. in Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. She is currently pursuing her M.S. in Electrical Engineering with Prof. Raluca Illi’s research group, Heliophysics Research and Applications (HeRA), as a graduate research assistant. She is focusing on the application of Seven Ion Polar Wind Outflow Model (7iPWOM) to model early earth conditions.

Apart from academics, Soo Min likes to bake sweets and record herself singing. 

Elizabeth joined the HeRA team as an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering. Her research focused on using numerical analysis to improve the theoretical understanding of electromagnetic phenomena in the ionosphere. Outside of school, she enjoys running and playing music.

Leihao joined the HeRA group in Fall 2018 and worked on the design of algorithms to automate identification of event classes of space weather phenomena.

Yicong joined the HeRA group in the Fall 2018 semester, and worked on a research project related to the data visualization. This entailed the development of an algorithm to visualize isosurfaces of certain plasma parameters from a data set based on an unstructured grid.

Isha joined the HeRA Group as an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering and she became interested in Professor Ilie’s research when she was taking ECE 329 with her, and reached out to her about possible research opportunities. “I have had a great experience with this group, working with extremely supportive, encouraging and hardworking people and have learnt a lot about Space Physics, a field that I wasn’t much familiar with earlier. Her other interests include Artificial Intelligence and Circuit Analysis.”

Isha is now a graduate student at Columbia University.

Shiru joined the HeRA Group as an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering. Inspired by ECE 329 course, she conducted research on simulations of ionospheric outflows and magnetospheric dynamics. Based on this work, she has been awarded the Indira Gunda Saladi Engineering Research Prize.

Her post-graduate plan includes attending graduate schools as a master student and working in the industry. Outside of school, her other interests include traveling and taking care of her pet fish, soupy.

Richa joined the HeRA group in the Spring 2019 semester. She has worked on creating 3D visualizations and extracting information regarding the electromagnetic fields and plasma flows in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Tianhao joined the HeRA group in the Fall 2018 semester. He has worked on creating high fidelity visualizations of electromagnetic fields and plasma properties in the Earth’s magnetosphere, based on numerical simulations using the SWMF.

Tianhao is currently pursuing a M.S degree at ECE Illinois.