Mei-Yun Lin
Mei-Yun is a Ph.D. candidate in the HeRA group within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Raluca Ilie. Her primary research focus is understanding the acceleration mechanisms responsible for ionospheric outflow, and its impacts on the magnetospheric dynamics.
Before coming to the United States for graduate school, Mei-Yun obtained a bachelor’s degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering from the National Taiwan University in Taiwan, where she is originally from. Through rigorous training at UIUC she quickly developed the skills to become an expert in numerical modeling, and in particular of ionospheric outflow models. She has been awarded the NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship in 2021, a fellowship that provides research grants to graduate students who are designing and performing research projects relevant to interests of the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Earth Sciences. This will allows Mei-Yun to continue her research on the contribution and the energization mechanisms of heavy ions in the polar wind.
Her work had also been recognized by the American Geophysical Union, where she was awarded the Outstanding Student Presentation Award in both 2019 and 2020, and Best Student Presentation Award at the Geospace Environmental Modeling Meeting in 2018. Recently, Mei-Yun has been the recipient of the Yuen T. Lo Outstanding Graduate Research Award for 2020-2021. This award is presented to a doctoral degree candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who has demonstrated excellence in research in the areas of electromagnetics or antennas.
In addition to research, Mei-Yun currently serves as the Student Representative of the NSF Geospace Environment Modeling Program. She was also selected to attend the 2021 MIT EECS Rising Stars workshop, an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs with underrepresented gender identities who are interested in pursuing academic careers. In addition, Mei-Yun Lin has been selected as one of the Mavis Future Faculty Fellows (MF3) for the 2021-2022 academic year, a program designed to facilitate the training for the next generation of great engineering professors
Her long-term goal is to follow an academic path and become a professor, who will implement engineering skills to augment the accuracy and efficiency of space plasmas modeling. Outside her scholarly activities, Mei-Yun enjoys driving (safely), gardening, baking, hiking and doing yoga. Read more about Mei-Yun here.