Jonathan J Makela

Biography

Prof. Makela earned his B.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) degrees from Cornell University from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Cornell's College of Engineering. From 2002-2004 he was a post-doctoral research associate at the Naval Research Laboratory, researching in the Thermosphere-Ionosphere Research Applications group. He joined ECE ILLINOIS' faculty in 2004 where he is currently a Professor. He has received several awards for his research and teaching, including the 2011 Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award from the IEEE Education Society and the 2008 Zeldovich Medal form the international Committee on Space Research and Russian Academy of Sciences.

Research Interest

Prof. Makela's research interests lie in multi-technique remote sensing of the Earth's upper atmosphere. He works with ground- and satellite-based instrumentation to study both the quiet-time and storm-time behavior of this region at low- and mid-latitudes. To accomplish this, his group develops, tests, and deploys suites of sensors to sites around the world. These instruments include portable imaging systems, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, and Fabry-Perot interferometers. His research group is currently working on developing new techniques and algorithms to simultaneously analyze these multiple datasets to better understand the underlying electrodynamics of instability processes in the equatorial and mid-latitude ionosphere, as well as the physics coupling of the neutral atmosphere to the electrified plasma in the ionosphere. They are also developing algorithms that will be used by the NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer mission, which will launch in 2017 and study the upward coupling between the atmosphere and near-space environment. His group’s work has implications for improving specification and forecasting of space weather, natural hazards warnings, improving distributed sensing techniques, and furthering our understanding of basic space plasma physics.