Frederick Wilder, PhD

Dr. Frederick Wilder, PhD

Hi, I am Rick Wilder and I am a space plasma physicist and Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. I use the earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere as a laboratory to understand both the fundamental physics of plasmas and space weather that effects the technologies we depend on. My main research interests include magnetic reconnection, wave-particle interactions in plasma, and the electrodynamic interaction between the magnetosphere and ionosphere.

I received my Ph.D. in 2011 from Virginia Tech, where I worked on SuperDARN radar and ground magnetometer observations of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system under the supervision of Dr. Robert Clauer. Additionally, I helped build and deploy ground instruments in both Virginia and Antarctica. I then went on to do post-doctoral research in at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder, CO, where I studied how electric currents in the ionosphere can heat our polar upper atmosphere. I continued as a research scientist at LASP, working on studying magnetic reconnection using the NASA Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission.

I am currently working on the MMS mission’s Burst Data and Scientist In The Loop (SITL) program and teach in the Physics Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. You can learn more about my projects here! Welcome!