The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has appointed Allison Jaynes as the F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor.
The three-year appointment comes with an annual discretionary research fund of $4,000 which may be used for scholarly work, professional travel, programmatic enhancements such as symposia, colloquia, hosting special visitors, or other initiatives.
Associate Professor Allison Jaynes’s research focuses on space weather, the inner magnetosphere, and the radiation belts and how those regions of geospace connect to atmospheric and auroral physics. She joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 2017 after receiving a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire and working as a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
She has been a Co-Investigator on the Van Allen Probes NASA satellite mission. She is currently a Team Member on NASA's MMS mission and a Co-I on the Voyager mission. Prof. Jaynes is currently serving as a Steering Committee member on the National Academies' Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics. She has served as a member of the AGU Nomination Task Force, as a member of the National Academies study on Increasing PI Diversity and Inclusion in the Leadership of Competed Space Missions, and as a member of the Heliophysics Advisory Committee for NASA HQ. She previously served as Co-Chair of the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC) Science and Technology Definitions Team for NASA. She was awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER award in 2020 and the Dean's Scholar award at the University of Iowa in 2022.
Prof. Jaynes advises five Ph.D. students and was a recipient of the University of Iowa Postdoctoral Association Mentor Award. She teaches multiple graduate and undergraduate courses including a newly developed course on spaceflight hardware (The Edge of Space: Mission and Instrument Design for Spaceflight) and a special topics course on planetary magnetospheres. She is deeply committed to equity and inclusion in STEM, and is passionate about promoting active learning and positive team dynamics.