Rate My Professor Jens Mahlmann

Jens Mahlmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, where he also serves as the EPaCO Group Lead for Extreme Plasmas around Compact Objects. He completed his B.Sc. in Physics from Leibniz University of Hannover in 2014, M.Sc. in Physics from the same institution in 2016, and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Valencia in 2020, earning a distinction of Cum Laude for his thesis on Dynamics in the Magnetospheres of Compact Objects. His academic journey was supported by scholarships from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Prior to his current role starting in January 2025, Mahlmann was a THEA Fellow at Columbia University from 2023 to 2024, during which he was also a visiting scholar at Dartmouth, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University from 2020 to 2023. He has mentored undergraduate and graduate students, supervised student-led research projects resulting in publications, and organized seminars such as Princeton Astroplasmas.

Mahlmann's research centers on high-energy astrophysics, focusing on plasma processes in ultra-magnetized environments around compact objects like magnetars, black holes, and neutron stars. He investigates mechanisms for radio and X-ray bursts during magnetospheric instabilities using theoretical models, particle-in-cell simulations, force-free electrodynamics, and high-performance computing on systems like Frontier, Pleiades, and MareNostrum. Notable publications include Superluminal Wave Activation at Relativistic Magnetized Shocks (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2026, student co-lead), Electrodynamics and Dissipation in the Binary Magnetosphere of Premerger Neutron Stars (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025), Spindown of Pulsars Interacting with Companion Winds (The Astrophysical Journal, 2024, student lead), Three-dimensional dynamics of strongly twisted magnetar magnetospheres (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2023), and Electromagnetic fireworks: fast radio bursts from rapid reconnection in the compressed magnetar wind (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022). His contributions have earned him an NSF grant (AST-2508744, 2025-2028) for plasma dynamics in radiation-rich magnetar magnetospheres, supercomputing allocations, the James B. Hartle award for best student presentation at GR22 (2019), and an invitation to the Nobel Laureate Meeting (2019). Mahlmann peer-reviews for journals including Nature Astronomy, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, and teaches courses such as High Energy Astrophysics (ASTR 75), Computational Plasma Dynamics (PHYS 118), and Magnetohydrodynamics (PHYS 115).