Research Professor Emerita
Research Interests: Solar wind, space weather, and solar wind – magnetosphere coupling.
Professor Nancy Crooker works in the area of heliospheric and solar-terrestrial physics, with particular interests in coronal mass ejections, the hurricanes of space, in the structure of the heliospheric current sheet, a global boundary which separates magnetic fields of opposite polarity, and in the magnetic flux budget of the heliosphere, which waxes and wanes with the 11-year sunspot cycle. She leads an effort supported by NASA and NSF to determine the magnetic topology of heliospheric structures using in situ electron and magnetic field data from a number of spacecraft. She is best known for developing the concept of antiparallel merging, a process of coupling between the solar wind and the magnetosphere, for revealing the extent to which the solar wind consists of transient as opposed to steady-state structures, and for the central role coronal mass ejections play in governing the magnetic flux in the heliosphere.