Erika Palmerio

ST Solar-Terrestrial Sciences

The 2024 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Erika Palmerio for outstanding research in analysing complex solar transients and their space weather effects.

Erika Palmerio has rapidly established herself as one of the leading early career scientists in the field of solar terrestrial sciences. She got her PhD in 2019 from the University of Helsinki and received right after the prestigious NASA Living With a Star Jack Eddy Postdoctoral Fellow position at the Unviversity of California, Berkeley (2019 -2021). Currently, Palmerio is a research scientist at the Predictive Science Inc. (PSI), based in San Diego, California.

Palmerio’s research interests are focused on the evolution of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun throughout the heliosphere, spread of solar energetic particles, as well as the space weather consequences of CMEs and solar wind streams at the Earth and other planets of our solar system. Her research expertise is exceptionally diverse and wide (> 40 papers in referred journals) for her research career and she has taken the full advantage of the recent unprecedented multi-spacecraft observational capabilities (e.g., Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe) of the Sun and the heliosphere, supported by coronal and heliospheric modelling. These works have provided significant new knowledge on the field on how solar transients evolve and affect the solar system, and highlighted the importance of using multiple vantage point observations and versatile approaches in the analysis to achieve the correct interpretation of the events. She has in particular focused on ‘problem storms’ that due to observational limitations and/or complexity of the event and its evolution can lead to the unexpected space weather effects. Palmerio has given a number of invited talks on these works. She is also very active in the scientific community. For example, she regularly co-organises scientific sessions at the major conferences of the field, and participates and co-leads International Space Science Institute (ISSI) teams. In addition, Palmerio is very active in science communication.