Dr. Fran Bagenal is a senior research scientist and professor emerita at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She has participated in several of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno. She has given many talks at schools and public events on the exploration of the outer solar system.
Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States. In 1989 she joined the faculty at the University of Colorado in the Department of Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences. In 2015, after 26 years of teaching, she gave up her faculty position to focus on New Horizons reaching Pluto and, the following year, Juno going into orbit around Jupiter.
Dr Bagenal’s Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_Bagenal and her IMDb site is https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3293128/