Name: Jun Cui

Position: Professor/Department head

Office: Haiqin No.2 A220

Email: cuijun7 at mail.sysu.edu.cn

Areas of Interest:

Planetary atmospheres and ionospheres

Research Overview:

Prof. Jun Cui is a planetary scientist and a space physicist, leading a research group at PEARL with main focuses on the upper atmospheres and ionospheres of different solar system bodies. These regions act as the link between the planetary bodies and their external environments, since they represent where solar short-wave photons and charged particles deposit their energies, induce multifaceted processes such as heating, ionization, dissociation, chemistry, airglow emission, as well as neutral and plasma escape. Some of these processes are crucial for understanding the climate evolution on planets such as the evolution of Mars from a warm and wet early state to the cold and arid current state. Over nearly two decades, Prof. Jun Cui has combined multi-instrument spacecraft data analysis and sophisticated numerical modeling to explore the upper atmospheres and ionosphere of Mars, Venus, and Titan, among others. He is also involved in nearly all CNSA planetary missions.