Congratulations to Dr. Dinesh Radhakrishnan!

We are proud to announce that Dinesh Radhakrishnan has successfully defended his dissertation,
“Journeying Through the Magnetopause: Statistical Study of the Kelvin–Helmholtz Instabilities as Seen by the MMS Mission.”
Date: Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Advisor: Dr. Stephen Fuselier

In the vast expanse of near-Earth space, plasma carried by the solar wind continuously interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, driving complex and dynamic processes at the boundary of our magnetosphere. While magnetic reconnection dominates energy transfer on the dayside, velocity shear at the flanks can trigger the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (KHI)—a process that rolls plasma into vortices, mixing material and transporting energy across the magnetopause.

Dinesh’s dissertation presents a comprehensive statistical and simulation-based investigation of KHI using observations from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. His work established a robust catalog of KHI events occurring under steady solar wind conditions, identifying a distinct two-layer boundary structure and revealing how instabilities preferentially form at the inner magnetopause boundary.

Through combined MMS observations and 2D MHD simulations, Dinesh quantified how parallel magnetic fields suppress instability at the outer boundary while enabling growth at the inner layer—ultimately channeling energy from the solar wind into the magnetosphere. His findings show that KHI waves can transport up to 50 gigawatts of power during nonlinear stages and contribute to ion heating and plasma mixing across Earth’s flanks.

Together, these results establish KHI as a significant and sustained mechanism for solar wind entry and plasma heating, complementing magnetic reconnection in driving global magnetospheric dynamics.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Dinesh Radhakrishnan on this remarkable scientific achievement!