As award winners of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Ahmed Nasser Mahgoub from Egypt and Dr. Diptiranjan Rout from India will do research at the German Research Centre for Geosciences starting this March. The scientists receive the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers and will conduct research in Section 2.3 "Geomagnetism". The fellowship explicitly supports experienced and above-average qualified international scientists, who in this way get the opportunity to cooperate with a German institution. Dr. Diptiranjan Rout will be hosted by Prof. Dr. Claudia Stolle, head of the section "Geomagnetism"; Dr. Maghoub will conduct research with Dr. Monika Korte, head of the working group "Evolution of the Earth's Magnetic Field".

Dr. Ahmed Nasser Mahgoub studied at Assiut University in Egypt and subsequently received his PhD from the Universidad Nacional Autónomica de México (UNAM). There he worked on paleomagnetic measurements of lava samples, both to obtain information on past magnetic field changes and to contribute to the dating and understanding of several Mexican volcanoes.

In his current project, Dr. Mahgoub will focus on the global reconstruction of the Earth's magnetic field during the last pole reversal about 780,000 years ago. Based on globally published paleomagnetic data from volcanic rocks and sediments, the magnetic field model developed will serve both to better understand the processes in the Earth's core during the pole reversal and to estimate the reduced magnetic shielding effect against solar wind and cosmic rays during such extreme magnetic field changes.

Dr. Diptiranjan Rout studied physics at the National Institute of Technology Rourkela, then earned his Ph.D. in space physics at the Physical Research Laboratory in India. His research interests include solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere coupling, space weather, and geoeffectiveness of solar wind structures. He was until recently a postdoctoral fellow at Clemson University in South Carolina in the United States.

At the German Research Centre for Geosciences, Dr. Rout will be involved in a project aimed at assessing the strength as well as variations of auroral ionospheric currents as an indicator of severe space weather events. In particular, the propagation of the energy originating from the solar wind and the magnetosphere to the low-latitude upper atmosphere will be quantified and its global impact on ionospheric electro dynamics will be assessed. To this aim, magnetic data from the Swarm mission (three European Space Agency research satellites) and other satellites will be analysed together with ionospheric parameters measured by ground facilities.