Rate My Professor JAN EGEDAL

Jan Egedal is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A plasma physicist, he specializes in physical processes relevant to space and astrophysical applications, particularly magnetic reconnection. Egedal earned his PhD from the University of Oxford with a thesis titled 'Fast ions in tokamaks and their measurements by collective Thomson scattering.' Prior to UW-Madison, he served as a principal research scientist and Assistant Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Plasma Science and Fusion Center starting in 2005, where he led magnetic reconnection experiments on the Versatile Toroidal Facility. He joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013.

Affiliated with the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory, Egedal directs the Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment (TREX), probing magnetic reconnection under conditions mimicking Earth's magnetosphere. His research investigates how magnetic fields break and reconnect, driving electron acceleration, auroral displays, solar flares, and space weather events. Observations from NASA's Magnetosphere Multiscale mission have provided the clearest in-situ evidence of reconnection, confirming theoretical models and highlighting violations of the plasma frozen-in condition. Egedal received the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 2019. Notable publications include 'Large-scale electron acceleration by parallel electric fields during magnetic reconnection' (2012), 'A review of pressure anisotropy caused by electron trapping in collisionless plasma, and its implications for magnetic reconnection' (2013), 'Regimes of the electron diffusion region in magnetic reconnection' (2013), 'In Situ Discovery of an Electrostatic Potential, Trapping Electrons and Mediating Fast Reconnection in the Earth's Magnetotail' (2005), 'Equations of state for collisionless guide-field reconnection' (2009), and 'Analytical approximations for the current sheet adiabatic invariant' (2025). He has delivered colloquia on these topics, including at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and supervises graduate students in plasma physics.