About Me

     I am a Research Scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  I study the sometimes explosive coupling between particles and fields in magnetized plasmas.  You can lean more about my research interests by clicking here.  I primarily work in the space plasma group with Drs. Alan Lazarus and John Richardson and Prof. John Belcher on measurements by the Wind, IMP-8, and Voyager spacecraft.  I’m also involved on several radio science experiments including the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA) and the GRB All-Sky Radio Spectrometer 9GASE with folks at Haystack Observatory (Joe Salah, Colin Lonsdale, and Divya Oberoi) and the on-campus radio astronomy group led by Prof. Jacqueline Hewitt.  I am also a Visiting Scholar at Boston University and work with Prof. Harlan Spence at the BU Center for Space Physics on the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation.  Harlan is the PI and I am the Instrument Scientist for CRaTER, which will be launched on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008.

Justin Christophe Kasper  (Download my CV)

Research Scientist

 

Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

77 Massachusetts Avenue, Building 37-673

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307

 

Phone:     617-253-7611

Fax:          617-253-0861

Mobile:     617-253-8125

Email:       jck@mit.edu

Justin C. Kasper

Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research

Clockwise from top: Photos from our March 5 2005 wedding at Grand Central Terminal.  Tara and me during the ceremony, with our maid of honor Katie Lofton and best man Fred Niell; The long tables at Metrazur set for dinner; The wedding ceremony took place on the stairway leading up to Metrazur in the main concourse—Tara and her father walked across the concourse during the ceremony, and I walked from Track 25 with my parents.

Teaching 8.02T, the undergraduate Electricity and Magnetism course at MIT in the Spring of 2003.  In this photo Prof. John Belcher and I are standing with three students at an experiment in the TEAL classroom in Building 26.  This photo was in a New York Times article on innovations in undergraduate teaching that discussed the amazing work John has done.

     I was born in North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow), NY and grew up in Ossining, NY.  I graduated from Ossining High School in 1995.

     I received my undergraduate degree in Physics with Special Honors from the University of Chicago in 1999.  For the four years I was in Chicago I worked for Prof. John Simpson’s Cosmic Ray Group in the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research (LASR) at the Enrico Fermi Research Institute.  As a student data analyst, my main responsibilities were the production of cosmic ray data from the Ulysses High Energy Telescope and the archival of existing data onto CDROM.  My senior thesis was on measurements of the flux of the rare elements lithium, beryllium, and boron during solar energetic particle events.  I had a great time working at LASR and learned a great deal about the physics of the heliosphere—and the scientific process in general– from Prof. Simpson and other members of his group, including Drs. Clifford Lopate, Bruce Mckibben, and Jim Connell, now all at the University of New Hampshire, and from Ming Zhang, now at Florida. 

     My time at the U of C wasn’t all work, and with my friends Sean Buckley, Fred Niell, Matthew Vincenz, and Gene Ostrovsky we found time to groove to great music, explore Chicago, and participate in the annual Scavenger Hunt.  Oh yeah, we also constructed a one Megawatt pulsed extreme uv nitrogen laser, a multi-gigawatt fast-discharge capacitor bank system that could annihilate an apple in a microsecond, and a crimping solenoid so strong we could demagnetize magnets from ten feet and hear the discharge on am radios several miles away. 

     Sadly (or maybe this was a good thing) we graduated and moved on before our water-plasma cannon design advanced past an early 12” prototype.  We also never managed to test our system for using rocket-initiated lightening strikes to power the discharge experiments.  None of this would have been possible without the support and encouragement of the physics department, which allowed us to use an unused lab in the Kirsten Physics Teaching Center (KPTC) after we were “discovered” occupying an abandoned lab in the old LASR building.  I think the department has since come to their senses about unsupervised undergraduate research into high energy physics… 

     Our final hurrah was the production of very small amounts of the isotopes of uranium and plutonium used in nuclear weapons for the ‘99 Scav Hunt.  We had about 70 hours to do this from reading the item on the list, which asked for “weapons grade” material from a “breeder reactor”.  After a quick call to a befuddled panel of Scav Hunt judges to determine that the process didn't have to be self-sustaining or closed loop in the classical breeder reactor sense, we quickly assembled the equipment to transform thorium into heavier isotopes by bombarding it with a stream of thermal neutrons and verified the production of the desired isotopes by analyzing the gamma-ray emission from the new and excited nuclei.  The rest as they say is history.

     I moved to Cambridge in July of 1999.  That fall I began my doctoral work in the Astrophysics division of the Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  I spent that first summer starting work with Drs. Alan Lazarus and Matthias Aellig on the Faraday Cup instrument for the Triana spacecraft.  The Triana Faraday Cup is a beautiful instrument, if I do say so.  We took advantage of the fact that the spacecraft was three-axis stabilized and Sun-pointing to build an instrument that could measure the bulk characteristics of the hydrogen and helium distribution functions at a rate of about 2 Hz.  A conceptual design for the instrument was in place and I soon found myself at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center conducting beam tests with Drs. Keith Ogilvie and Dennis Chornay. 

     We delivered the Faraday Cup to NASA in 2001, and it was subsequently integrated with Triana.  Sadly, the launch date of Triana, which was intended for launch on the space shuttle, kept slipping for a variety of reasons.  Given the tight restrictions on shuttle launches in the wake of the Columbia disaster at the end of  flight STS-107 (the flight which was originally intended to be for Triana, incidentally), it is unlikely Triana will be launched unless a launch opportunity on an alternative vehicle can be identified. 

     While the particular events around Triana are unfortunate, it is very common in space exploration for missions to be delayed.  My experience with Triana taught me the importance in high-risk experimental physics of working on multiple projects.  I quickly turned my attention to the decade long dataset of solar wind observations by another pair of MIT-designed Faraday Cups, namely the ion portion of the Solar Wind Experiment on the Wind spacecraft.  I discovered that with the large number of measurements of the solar wind collected by Wind since launch in 1994 I could construct powerful constraints on the roles of plasma micro-instabilities and other non-thermal processes in the solar wind.  Instead of detailing the calibration of the Triana Faraday Cups as I had expected, my doctoral thesis compared theoretical predictions for instabilities and shocks with observations, producing among other things the first demonstration of the firehose instability.  I defended on 13 December (A Friday!), 2002.

Photos from York, Maine: (left) right after the happy event and (right) a closeup of Tara’s engagement bling (April 12, 2002).

     But something much more important happened in 2002!  Tara and I got engaged on a beautiful April day in York, Maine, on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic ocean.  We met at Chicago and moved to Boston together to have an adventure that continues to this day.  An amusing/sad story is that after we got engaged we stopped by a Dairy Queen for chocolate dipped soft-serve ice cream cones (a tasty first for me).  Fred called my cell to ask how things were going (everyone knew the purpose of the trip to Maine) and I blurt out, “I had my first Dairy Queen! … and we got engaged!”

The Sun sets in the Western Australian outback on one of the three Early Deployment tiles for the Mileura Wide-Field Array that were constructed this year.  In the Spring of 2006 we received full funding from the NSF to construct MWA.

     After I defended that December I quickly submitted the final copy of my thesis and took an appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Center for Space Research (now the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research).  I jumped on an opportunity to teach 8.02T, an undergraduate electricity and magnetism course, for the physics department that Spring.  8.02T is a product of the Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) program developed by Prof. John Belcher  I had followed the development of the TEAL program over the previous two years, and was a TA for John in an experimental version of the course in 2002.  I won’t try to summarize the philosophy of the TEAL program here, but I believe that it is the most effective way to teach large groups of non-physics majors conceptually challenging fields such as electricity and magnetism.

     One of the most rewarding aspects of my time at MIT has been interacting with amazing students.  In addition to teaching electricity and magnetism, I have supervised eight undergraduates and one graduate student.  In the Spring of 2004 I received the “Dean’s Award for Teaching and Student Advising” from the Dean of Sciences at MIT. 

     The last year has been very eventful.  On March 5, 2005 Tara and I were married in a short but perfect ceremony at Grand Central Terminal in New York City in front of a hundred relatives and friends, and several hundred (surprisingly?!) cheerful New Yorkers.  Our guests assembled on the stairs in the main concourse.  Fred was our best man, and came in with Tara’s mother from one side of the station.  I came in from the opposite side with my parents, and Tara and her father walked across the entire concourse, past the information clock.  It was really beautiful.

    What else is going on?  Well I took an appointment as a Research Scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.  I’m very interested in any new ways to directly or remotely measure the properties of energetic plasmas.  If you explore my web page you can read about the many exciting experiments I’m working on in space (Wind, Voyager, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) and on the ground (Mileura Wide-Field Array, GRB All-Sky Spectrometer).  It’s satisfying to be a Research Scientist with a PhD in Physics five years after graduating college, but I’m just getting started!