Jamie Sue Rankin is a research scientist at Princeton University, where she studies the transport and acceleration of cosmic rays, energetic particles, and plasma throughout the heliosphere – a vast protective bubble carved out by the Sun’s wind – and the surrounding interstellar environment. She earned her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2019, where she witnessed firsthand the historic moment when humanity became interstellar explorers through the Voyager missions. Her doctoral thesis was among the first to contribute to this groundbreaking new science. She currently serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for NASA’s Voyager mission and is among the youngest scientists to hold this leadership role.

In addition to her work on Voyager, Dr. Rankin has played pivotal roles in developing cutting-edge instrumentation for other NASA missions, including Parker Solar Probe, which has made the closest measurements ever taken of the Sun, and NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission, which launched in September 2025. On IMAP, she serves as instrument lead for the Solar Wind and Pickup Ion (SWAPI), which measures solar wind plasma and pickup ions originating from the interstellar wind. She led SWAPI’s development from early prototyping through flight qualification, delivery, commissioning, and early science operations.

The SWAPI instrument was designed, assembled, and calibrated in Princeton’s Space Physics Laboratory, which Dr. Rankin helped establish beginning in 2020 alongside Professor Dave McComas and colleagues. The laboratory supports both experimental research in space instrumentation as well as hands‑on student training, including Princeton’s two‑semester Space Physics Laboratory course.

As a scientist, Dr. Rankin thrives on the challenge of connecting observations from the most extreme regions of space – designing hardware and analyzing data to link the physics of the solar wind, the heliosphere, and the interstellar medium, and to uncover how our Sun interacts with the galaxy beyond.