Vitali Shapiro

Professor Shapiro's expertise is in nonlinear wave phenomena and collective interaction in plasmas, as well as plasma and fluid turbulence. He is also an authority on the application of basic plasma physics to space physics and astrophysics, especially to the problems of solar wind interaction with planets, shocks, wave activity and particle acceleration at shocks. ..As a fellow of the California Space Institute (see research page), Shapiro is performing research that allows him to model the formation and collapse of lower-hybrid waves created by the interactions between waves of solar wind and particles from several astronomical sources. He has been especially productive in developing models that describe nonlinear evolution of lower-hybrid waves and their role in particle acceleration and wave dissipation in collisionless space plasmas. Shapiro is also successfully working on the construction of different models of particle acceleration at space and astrophysical shocks, including diffuse Fermi acceleration at the front of supernova shocks, shock surfing acceleration at the termination shock.

Vitali Shapiro joined the UCSD faculty in 1994, with joint appointments in the Jacobs School and the Department of Physics. He received his Ph.D. from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in the former Soviet Union in 1963, and a subsequent D.Sc. from the USSR's Institute for Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk in 1967. In 1976, Shapiro joined the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Science in Moscow, where he was elected head of the Laboratory for Fundamental Plasma Studies. He was also Professor of Space Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. From 1992-94, he was a Research Physicist at the University of California's systemwide California Space Institute. Shapiro won the USSR State Prize in Physics for contributions to the theory of nonlinear dynamics of the completely ionized plasma (1987). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research.