Career
Joan Feynman made original studies of the interactions between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere. While working at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1971, Feynman showed that coronal mass ejections could be identified by the presence of helium in the solar wind. She subsequently worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and the National Science Foundation. In 1985, she moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using data from Explorer 33, she demonstrated that the occurrence of auroras is a product of the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere. In 1999 she was named as one of JPL's elite senior scientists and in 2000 was awarded NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal. She retired from JPL as a Senior Scientist in 2003, but continued to work, publishing as recently as 2007 on the influence of solar activity on the climate of the first millennium.
Feynman studied at Oberlin College, Syracuse University (PhD, 1958), and Columbia University. Her son Charles Hirshberg (from her first marriage to Richard Hirshberg) is news editor of Popular Science. She has been married to fellow astrophysicist Alexander Ruzmaikin since 1987.
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