Stuart Gilchrist

My career in science began during my PhD studies at The University of Sydney. There I worked on developing numerical models of the solar coronal magnetic field based on a NonLinear Force-Free Magnetic Field (NLFFF) approach. One of my achievements was the development the Current-Field Iteration in Spherical Coordinates (CFITS) code, for solving the NLFFF equations in a three-dimensional spherical domain. I still use CFITS to this day.

After graduation, I moved to Paris for an eighteen-month postdoc position at l’Observatoire de Paris Meudon. There I worked on Magneto-HydroDynamic (MHD) models of solar eruptions and topological analysis of magnetic fields. I then moved to Colorado in 2015, to take up a postdoc position at NorthWest Research Associates (NWRA) in Boulder. There I again worked on MHD and NLFFF modeling. In 2019 I became a research scientist and served as principal investigator on the NSF award “Critical Assessment of the Three-dimensional (3D) Standard Model of Solar Eruptions Using a Data-driven MagnetoHydroDynamic (MHD) Approach”. This work focused heavily on model validation, i.e. how do we know when our computer models are actually real? This sparked by interest in Bayesian hypothesis testing and statistics.

In 2022, I moved to the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) as a research scientist. At PSI, I am interested in pursuing cross-disciplinary research that straddles the domains of both planetary science and solar/heliophysics.