Biography

Dr. Zirnstein is a research scientist specializing in the simulation and analysis of hydrogen energetic neutral atom (ENA) emission from the solar wind-local interstellar medium interaction as well as the transport of interstellar pickup ions through the heliosphere and beyond the heliopause. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, specializing in Space Science. He developed a numerical code that computes hydrogen ENA fluxes at 1 au for NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission by post-processing 3D MHD-plasma/kinetic-neutral simulation results of the heliosphere, including the development of time-independent and -dependent algorithms, employing MPI and distributed/shared memory algorithms in C that run on multi-node computer clusters, and simulation/data analysis and visualization/analysis in IDL, MATLAB, and Mathematica. His current research continues the simulation and analysis of observations made by the IBEX mission, as well as supporting the analysis of New Horizon’s Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument measurements at the Pluto plasma environment and in the solar wind. He helps analyze data from the Solar Wind And Pickup Ion (SWAPI) instrument and simulates the measurements, and serves on the science teams for the IMAP-Lo, IMAP-Hi, and IMAP-Ultra ENA imagers, all onboard the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) that was launched in September 2025.

Curriculum Vitae

ORCID