Galvin earned her B.S. in
physics from
Purdue University, and has an M.S. and a Ph.D.[1] in physics from the
University of Maryland.[2] Galvin was a research faculty member of the University of Maryland before moving to the University of New Hampshire in 1997.[3] As of 2011, Galvin is a research professor in physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and the director of the New Hampshire NASA
Space Grant program and the New Hampshire NASA EPSCoR program.[3]
In 2019, Galvin was named a fellow of the
American Geophysical Union, who cited her "for exceptional contributions to our understanding of the properties of the solar wind, its solar sources, and its structure in the
heliosphere."[4]
Research
Galvin is a space physicist whose research is on
heliophysics, the science of the sun. Galvin's early research included working on the Ultra-Low Energy Charge Analyzer (ULECA) instrumentation for two of the NASA-ESA International Sun-Earth Explorer spacecraft (ISEE-1 and ISEE-3) with which she examined the ions upstream of Earth's
bow shock[5] and used changes in the charge state of
heavy ions to track the solar wind ionization temperature.[6] Galvin has also examined heavy ions in the comet
21P/Giacobini–Zinner.[7] Galvin worked on the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) instrumentation for the
Ulysses spacecraft that was a shared venture between
NASA and the
European Space Agency.[8] Ulysses enabled Galvin and colleagues to identify interstellar hydrogen[9] and to identify events associated with
coronal mass ejections, also known as solar explosions.[10]
Galvin also worked on the Mass Time-of-Flight (MTOF) and Proton Monitor (PM) instrumentation on the NASA-ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission and on the development of a supra-thermal ion experiment that flew on the NASA-Japan Geotail mission. Galvin was the lead for the Suprathermal Ion Composition Spectrometer (STICS) on the NASA Wind spacecraft. Galvin is the principal investigator for the PLasma and SupraThermal Ion Composition (PLASTIC) instruments on the two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory
STEREO spacecraft.[11][12] In 2009, data from PLASTIC provided the solar wind measurements for the first three-dimensional images of a
coronal mass ejection from the sun.[13] In 2012, Galvin and colleagues observed an extreme storm which will help establish the conditions that lead to the prediction of sun storms and thereby reduce their impact on communications on Earth.[14][13] On the
Solar Orbiter platform, Galvin is the lead for the group that developed the time of flight section of the Heavy Ion Sensor on the Solar Wind Analyser platform.[15][16] She is a team member of the HelioSwarm NASA MIDEX mission, currently under development.