Prize Recipient

Jonathan Squire
University of Otago

"For theoretical contributions to our understanding of plasma waves and turbulence in astrophysical plasmas and the solar wind, and for the discovery and characterization of a broad class of instabilities in dusty astrophysical plasmas."

Jonathan Squire is a Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Following an undergraduate degree at Otago from 2005-2009, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship for graduate study in the US, carrying out a PhD at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory from 2010-2015. He then undertook a postdoctoral fellowship in the astronomy department at the California Institute of Technology, before moving back to the University of Otago as a Rutherford Discovery Fellow in 2018. Dr. Squire's research covers a range of topics in astrophysical and space plasma theory, focusing particularly on how kinetic processes in plasmas impact their macroscopic properties such as heating, turbulence, and transport. Using numerical simulations and basic theory, he has applied these ideas in a variety of contexts including the turbulent heating of the solar wind and corona, collisionless plasmas with weak magnetic fields, magnetic-field amplification and self organization (dynamo), cosmic-ray transport, and planet formation in protoplanetary disks. For his PhD research on large-scale dynamos he was awarded the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in 2017. Dr. Squire is a member of the American Physical Society and American Geophysical Union.