Fran Bagenal

Frances "Fran" Bagenal is a Professor Emerita of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in the fields of space plasmas and planetary magnetospheres. Born in Dorchester, Dorset, she grew up near Cambridge, England, studied at Lancaster University, and moved to the United States in 1976 to pursue graduate work at MIT, where she completed her PhD in 1981. She has been a plasma science team member on the Voyager, Galileo, Deep Space 1, Cassini, New Horizons, and Juno missions, and served as particles and plasma science team leader on New Horizons and Juno. In 2021 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, which recognised her as a leading expert on the properties of plasmas in the magnetospheres of the outer planets.