Please join us in congratulating Professor Vassilis Angelopoulos on receiving the NASA Outstanding Public Leadership Medal for 2024. The Agency Honor Awards are NASA’s most prestigious form of recognition and are presented to individuals and teams who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the Agency’s mission. Professor Angelopoulos is receiving the Public Leadership Medal in recognition of his outstanding leadership generating cutting edge Heliophysics research and educating, cultivating, and inspiring a new generation of heliophysicists.
Vassilis Angelopoulos has been a professor in the UCLA Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences Department and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics since 2007. His primary areas of scientific research are how particles are accelerated in Earth's magnetosphere, how the upper atmosphere and ionosphere respond to space currents, and how the lunar environment is affected by its interaction with the solar wind. As Principal Investigator of NASA’s THEMIS and ARTEMIS missions, he led the development of the associated five satellites and twenty ground-based observatories. At UCLA he proposed, oversaw the development, successful launch, and operation of the two ELFIN CubeSats until their deorbit in September 2022. Since its inception, >400 undergraduates have been trained on ELFIN under his and his group’s mentorship.