Meet: Daniel Berdichevsky

Who I Am
I was born Daniel Benjamin Berdichevsky. I have a wife and five children, ages 11 to 22 years old, whom I love very much. We also have a dog Candice, two cats and two ferrets. I am from Rosario, Provincia de Santa Fe, Argentina, a port city of immigrants at the shores of the mighty Parana River. It is a community bursting with commerce and industry.

When I was a Child
When I was a child, living in a house without air-conditioning, my family and I would spend the summer evenings outside waiting for the house to cool. It was then that I stared at the sky, dreaming of other inhabited worlds. In my free time I read science-fiction books and dreamed of going to the moon with sandwiches and sodas, which I liked a lot. This was whenever I was not busy dreaming of the triumphs of my favorite "futbol" (soccer in the USA) team Rosario Central.

My Education
My curiosity about traveling to the stars turned me into wondering about the ways nature works, so it was natural to me to try physics as a trade. I studied with honors in "Licenciado en Fisica" from the University of Rosario with a thesis on the collective excitations of the atomic nucleus. I then moved to West Berlin, Germany, where I attended the Hahn-Meitner-Institut and the old Justus-Liebig University of Giessen in Hesse, where I got a physics degree in the philosophy of nature (a PhD in science).

What I Do
In 1987 we moved from Canada in the USA. First we were at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1989 I was hired to perform technical support to space physicists working on automated experiments in spacecraft roaming the interplanetary medium. I currently do the same type of work supporting the International Solar Terrestrial Physics program and its Science Planning and Operations Facility at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

My days go somewhat like this... After arriving at my office, I turn on my computer (a Mac) and connect to particular Web pages that monitor the current flow of information on plasma, magnetic field and the presence or not of energetic particles coming from the Sun, from instruments tens to hundreds of Earth radii (1 Earth radius = 6380 Km!) from Earth. I communicate interesting or troubling conditions in these regions of space near Earth to other scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, goverment science labs and colleges here and elsewhere in the world. During most of my time, however, I work in scientific projects in collaboration with other scientists. My current scientific area of interest is the study of the expanding solar corona, the solar wind that connects the Sun and the Earth and its related element of space weather.