[IGPP Everyone] Fwd: Professor Maha Ashour-Abdalla

[Kevin McKeegan]

Dear Colleagues,
    Some of you have already heard the sad news of the death last night of
Professor Maha Ashour-Abdalla.  Some further information about her life and
academic achievements are given below in the message from Jean Turner,
Chair of Physics and Astronomy, and Ferd Coroniti, Associate Dean.  Maha
was a friend to EPSS and a force in space physics, at UCLA and beyond.  She
will be missed.
-Kevin
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Kevin D. McKeegan
Professor of Cosmochemistry & Geochemistry
Chair, Dept. of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567
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mckeegan at epss.ucla.edu


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Professor Maha Ashour-Abdalla
Date: Mon, 2 May 2016 15:33:27 -0700
From: Chair's Office <chair at physics.ucla.edu> <chair at physics.ucla.edu>
To: Chair's Office <chair at physics.ucla.edu> <chair at physics.ucla.edu>

Dear colleagues,



It is with great sadness that I inform you that Professor Maha
Ashour-Abdalla passed away yesterday evening. We have been notified by her
husband. She has been active in research and teaching until very recently.



Professor Maha Ashour-Abdalla received her Ph.D. from Imperial College in
London under the supervision of Professor J. Dungey, a pioneer of space
plasma physics. Her dissertation research concerned the nonlinear
interaction between electrons and coherent whistler mode waves. She then
spent several years in France as a postdoctoral scholar, and in 1976, she
came to UCLA to work in the space physics group headed by Professor C.
Kennel. In the early 1980’s, she formed the UCLA Space Simulation Group,
and successfully competed for an inaugural grant in NASA’s Solar
Terrestrial Theory Program.



During the following years, she became a world leader in the numerical
simulation of space plasmas, arguably the most important and effective
founder of this sub-field of space physics. In the mid-1980’s, Professor
Ashour-Abdalla founded the International School for Space Simulations
(ISSS), which continues to be the international forum for research in this
area. In the mid-1990’s, she developed the concept of Mission-Oriented
Theory, arguing that NASA spacecraft missions should have a strong
theoretical component as part of a mission’s basic science team. She
successfully implemented this concept for the OPEN mission, which involved
three satellites that investigated the large-scale dynamics of the
terrestrial magnetosphere, and pioneered the use of global
magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations to model the magnetosphere’s response
to storm-inducing changes in the solar wind. During the late 1990’s, she
pioneered the numerical technique of Large Scale Kinetics (LSK) to compute
particle trajectories in model electromagnetic fields and calculate the
phase space distributions of the magnetosphere’s ion and electron
populations, thereby explaining many of the particle signatures that were
observed by the OPEN satellites. More recently, she combined LSK
calculations and global MHD simulations with measurements from several
spacecraft including THEMIS to unravel the complex structure of the plasma
sheet during intervals when the solar wind magnetic field was northward,
discovering the unexpected decoupling of the dawn and dusk sources of tail
particles by a magnetic flux rope barrier. Finally, Professor
Ashour-Abdalla led the Space Plasma Simulation Group to be a key
participant in NASA’s Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission that was
launched in 2015.



Professor Ashour-Abdalla was only the second woman to join the Department
of Physics, breaking this new ground with Professor Nina Byers. She was
also a great teacher and will be remembered for her efforts and dedication
by her students as well as her colleagues.



She will be greatly missed.



Sincerely,



Jean Turner and Ferdinand Coroniti
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