Rate My Professor Valery Nakariakov

Professor Valery Nakariakov is a Full Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, where he is affiliated with the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics. He earned his MSc (Diploma) from the School of Radiophysics at Nizhny Novgorod State University in 1989, his PhD (kandidat fiziko-matematicheskih nauk) from the Department of Plasma Physics at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1993, and his higher doctorate DSc from the University of Warwick in 2007. His research interests centre on solar physics, plasma astrophysics, and nonlinear wave theory, with a particular emphasis on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves propagating through inhomogeneous, non-stationary, nonlinear, and active media such as space plasmas. These waves are linked to observed astrophysical phenomena in the Sun's atmosphere, solar wind, and Earth's magnetosphere. Nakariakov pioneered MHD coronal seismology, a technique for remote diagnostics of coronal plasmas based on the observational discovery of wave activity in the solar corona.

Nakariakov's seminal contributions include the analysis of TRACE observations of damped coronal loop oscillations and their implications for coronal heating (Nakariakov et al., Science, 1999), a comprehensive review of coronal waves and oscillations (Nakariakov and Verwichte, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, 2005), and the determination of coronal magnetic fields using loop oscillations (Nakariakov and Ofman, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2001). Other influential works encompass quasi-periodic pulsations in solar flares (Nakariakov and Melnikov, Space Science Reviews, 2009) and magnetohydrodynamic waves in coronal seismology (De Moortel and Nakariakov, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2012). He has received the Chapman Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 2024 and the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics in 2015. In 2025, he was awarded a £2.1 million grant from the European Research Council for his project in solar physics. Nakariakov serves on the Advisory Board of the journal Solar Physics for the term 2021–2024 and coordinates graduate admissions in the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, supervising PhD research in solar and space physics.