Prof. Gregory Howes is the new Departmental Executive Officer (DEO) of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, effective July 1, 2025.
He succeeds Dr. Mary Hall Reno, the Erich Funke Professor in the department, who served as DEO since 2023.
Dr. Howes was Director of Research Operations for the department in 2024-2025. In 2022, the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) at the University of Iowa selected Howes as a University of Iowa Scholar of the Year. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) by President Barack Obama in 2010 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2011. In 2016, he was selected for the Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics by the American Institute for Physics, he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018 and in 2022 was awarded the Landau-Spitzer Award for Outstanding Contributions to Plasma Physics jointly by the American and European Physical Societies.
His research focuses on the plasma physics of space and astrophysical environments—such as the solar corona, solar wind, and Earth’s magnetosphere—focusing on the fundamental processes of plasma turbulence, collisionless shocks, and magnetic reconnection. His research spans a broad range of approaches, including developing new theoretical models, performing supercomputer simulations, conducting laboratory experiments, and analyzing spacecraft measurements of space plasmas in the heliosphere and Earth’s magnetosphere.
In June 2021, Howes and his team published a study in Nature Communications providing definitive evidence that Alfven waves—powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagnetic storms—accelerate electrons toward Earth, producing the most brilliant auroras. This research experimentally confirmed a decades-long theory about electron acceleration in Earth’s auroral magnetosphere and generated 244 news articles across six continents.
In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate-level physics classes, Howes leads a broad research group mentoring research scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students in the cutting-edge modeling of the kinetic physics of space plasmas, using high-performance computing, spacecraft data analysis, and analytical modeling.
Dr. Howes earned his PhD from UCLA in 2004 and has previously held a postdoctoral research position at UC Berkeley before coming to the University of Iowa in Fall 2008. Over the past 17 years, he has secured more than $7.5 million in grants at the University of Iowa.