Dr. Simon Plunkett

Dr. Simon Plunkett is a program scientist in the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. He provides scientific leadership and oversight for the fleet of more than 20 operating missions that comprise the Heliophysics System Observatory (HSO). The missions in the HSO form a heterogeneous constellation to investigate the behavior of the interconnected heliophysics domain through simultaneous multipoint measurements and observations throughout that domain. He is also the senior scientist responsible for NASA’s contributions to the Solar Orbiter Collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) and the SOLAR-C mission led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). Previously, he was the lead program scientist for NASA’s Living With a Star program.

Prior to joining NASA, Plunkett was an astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where he led the Heliospheric Environment Section and conducted research on the solar corona and space weather. He was the project manager for development of the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and served as the science operations lead and co-investigator for instruments on NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). He also taught graduate courses in technical management at the Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering.

Dr. Plunkett holds B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from University College Dublin, Ireland, and an M.S. in technical management from Johns Hopkins University. He enjoys golf, fly fishing, outdoor cooking, travel, and spending time with family, not necessarily in that order.