About · UCLA Space Physics & AI Lab
Fundamental questions. Practical consequences.
We are a UCLA research group exploring the physics of near-Earth and planetary space—and building new ways to understand, model, and predict it.
SPACE PLASMA PHYSICS · SPACE WEATHER · AI FOR SCIENCE
A collaborative research community at UCLA
What brings us together
Curiosity across boundaries.
Space plasmas are complex, nonlinear, and only sparsely measured. Understanding them requires ideas to move freely between theory and observation, laboratory and simulation, fundamental discovery and operational need. Our group is built around that movement.
We study how waves and particles exchange energy, how radiation environments evolve, and how those processes affect spacecraft, technology, and people. Along the way, we develop computational and artificial-intelligence tools that can reveal structure in incomplete data and accelerate scientific discovery well beyond a single application.
DISCOVER
Explain the physics
We pursue durable physical understanding, from individual resonances to whole magnetospheres.
CONNECT
Bridge methods and communities
We connect observations, experiments, models, AI, and the people who make each perspective stronger.
TRANSLATE
Turn insight into capability
We carry fundamental knowledge toward space-weather specification, prediction, and real-world resilience.
Our point of view
How we approach hard problems.
Physics first
Prediction is most valuable when it deepens explanation. Models should expose mechanisms, assumptions, and limits.
Methods in conversation
The strongest answers emerge when measurements, analytic ideas, experiments, and computation challenge one another.
AI for understanding
We treat machine learning as a scientific instrument: a way to reconstruct, interpret, test, and discover—not simply a black box.
Science in community
Ambitious work is collaborative. We value generosity with ideas, careful mentorship, intellectual independence, and different paths into science.
At UCLA
A home for interdisciplinary space science.
The lab is led by Jacob Bortnik, professor and chair of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences and founding faculty director of the UCLA SPACE Institute. That setting creates natural connections across space physics, atmospheric science, engineering, computation, education, and the growing space sector.
Our researchers and students work at different career stages and across complementary specialties. The result is a group where a question can begin with a satellite observation, move through a physical model or laboratory test, and return as a new predictive capability.
Work with us
Bring a hard question—and a willingness to cross boundaries.
We welcome prospective students, researchers, and collaborators interested in space physics, space weather, and machine intelligence for science.