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Professor Spotlight: Dr. Katia Matcheva
by Steven Hochman



UPNews: Let's start from the beginning. Where are you from / where were you born?

Katia Matcheva: Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

UP: Where did you go to school?

KM: I got my undergraduate degree in Physics Engineering at the University of Plovdiv. My post-graduate studies there involved lasers, optics, and related technologies. After that, I went to Johns Hopkins to get a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences.

UP: What did you do after you got your PhD?

KM: I worked for 2 years at the Observatory of Paris. After that I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cornell. In 2005 I came to UF.

UP: What kind of research do you do?

KM: I study the dynamics of the planetary atmospheres. Presently, I am working on Jupiter and Saturn. The research deals with atmospheric waves: how they propagate; how they interact with the rest of the atmosphere. We are trying to detect their presence on other planets and then we analyze their properties (wavelength and frequency). We often compare the results with what we observe in the Earth's atmosphere. I am also interested in cloud physics. I am using spacecraft data from Cassini, Galileo and Voyager to understand the properties of the clouds on Jupiter and Saturn. The clouds are made of ice particles in some combination of ammonia and water ice, but the exact chemical composition remains elusive to the observations. Most likely the cloud particles are coated with some chemical compound that is present in small amounts in the atmosphere, but enough to make the chemical composition of the clouds difficult to identify.

UP: What do you do in your research?

KM: Mostly the research involves analyzing the data and then making a model to see how it all fits together.

UP: How complicated are these models? Do they require supercomputers?

KM: Most of the models I make require only my office computers to run. I write these in Fortran, and I use a Unix-based OS. I only use Windows for classes and presentations.

UP: How do you get the data?

KM: Sometimes probes are sent out to the planets and a weather package is sent down through the atmosphere. It measures different atmospheric parameters (temperature, density, pressure, wind, chemical composition …) as it falls. Unfortunately this doesn't happen very often since probes are expensive to send out. Because of this we rely mostly on remote sensing. To observe the planets we often use infrared rather than visible wavelengths. Heated objects emit photons at a wide range of wavelengths. The colder the object the longer the wavelengths at which the peak of the emission occurs. This is why, when we study the thermal emission coming from the planets, we need to go below the visible spectrum (which the sun peaks at) and rely on Infrared.

UP: Why doesn't Mercury have an atmosphere?

KM: Mercury's escape velocity is only half that of Earth's. The temperature on Mercury is very high, so the average kinetic energy of air molecules is much greater. Most of these particles reach escape velocity and leave. That combined with the impact of the solar wind has blown away most of Mercury's atmosphere.

UP: Which classes have you taught/will teach?

KM: I have taught PHY 3233 Electromagnetism and MET 1010 Introduction to Weather. Weather is a big class. There are about 150 undergraduates, mostly non-science majors. EM is very logical like most of physics. It is also somewhat abstract which makes a lot of the problems very interesting. I'll be teaching EM next fall as well. It's normal for professors to teach the same course 2 or 3 years in a row. It's practically inevitable that I will switch to teaching other classes and I look forward to that. In the near future I might be switching to lower level bigger classes like physics 1.

UP: What are your thoughts on teaching?



KM:
Teaching is mostly about interaction with the students. This makes it challenging for me to stay concentrated on the "story line". A one-page outline of the lecture helps me a lot to stay on track and have a discussion at the same time. The most difficult times are, however, when nobody is asking any questions.