Dr. Erika Palmerio is an outstanding early-career scientist whose work uniquely links solar eruptions, interplanetary propagation, and planetary impacts. Her innovative studies on stealth coronal mass ejection (CMEs) and complex CME interactions have substantially advanced our understanding of space weather drivers. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics in October 2019 from the University of Helsinki, under the mentorship of Professor Emilia Kilpua. Her thesis garnered both the Outstanding Thesis Award of her School and the University-wide Dissertation Award. Following her doctoral work, she was selected for the NASA LWS Jack Eddy Postdoctoral Fellowship, which took her to the University of California–Berkeley, and soon thereafter, she joined Predictive Science Incorporated in San Diego as a Research Scientist.

Dr. Palmerio’s scientific oeuvre spans bold interdisciplinarity and holistic systems thinking. She has merged remote sensing and in-situ spacecraft observations, and coupled those with state-of-the-art magnetohydrodynamic models, to illuminate how CMEs and solar energetic particles (SEP) events evolve — not just near Earth, but across the solar system. Her insights into the intrinsic magnetic structure of CMEs, including the class of elusive “stealth” CME events, and her analyses of interacting CMEs under complex solar conditions, have redefined what is possible in our field. Her work tracking these phenomena across interplanetary space shows not only technical mastery but a depth of vision: to see the heliosphere as a unified, dynamic system.

Particularly striking is her recent collaboration, leveraging the proximity of Parker Solar Probe and BepiColombo near Mercury’s orbit, to unveil the mesoscale structure of CME ejecta — a study that drew attention in Nature Astronomy and was profiled in AAS Nova.

Dr. Pamerio's publication record speaks volumes: 69 peer-reviewed papers, 14 as first author — a body of work whose quality and impact are unquestioned. The influence of her work is demonstrated through the more than 1,500 citations and in the many invited talks she has delivered across the globe.

Dr. Palmerio’s contributions extend beyond her own research. She is already a leader in our scientific community, guiding projects and teams, convening critical sessions, and shaping the future trajectory of heliophysics. She serves as Principal Investigator on NASA and NSF grants, co-leads an ISSI international team on tomographic inversion of synthetic white-light images, and has played key roles in the structuring of CME geometric reconstructions and stealth CME analyses. She has convened sessions at conferences, chaired symposiums, served on the steering committee of the Eddy Cross-disciplinary Symposium, and sat on numerous advisory boards and review panels.

For all of these reasons, the E-SWAN Awards Committee has decided to attribute the 2025 Alexander Chizhevsky Medal to Dr. Erika Palmerio.