Space physicist Christina Cohen first joined the Space Radiation Laboratory (SRL) as a postdoctoral scholar in 1996. At the time, the group was helmed by the late Edward Stone , a giant in the fields of space physics and planetary astronomy, who spent six decades at Caltech establishing the SRL and leading numerous space missions, including NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft .

"They were just the nicest people doing really cool stuff, and Ed treated everybody the same regardless of whether you were a grad student or postdoc," Cohen remembers. "You felt like you were an integral part of the team."

As a staff scientist on the SRL team for nearly 30 years now, Cohen has helped design and calibrate numerous instruments to measure solar energetic particles (SEPs), a type of cosmic ray released by the Sun during solar flares and coronal mass ejections.…