International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Ilya Usoskin

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 15 November 2017, Professor Ilya G. Usoskin is a distinguished Russian-Finnish space physicist and an internationally recognised scholar of solar variability, cosmic rays, and space climate. Born on 17 January 1965 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, he graduated with honours from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, now St. Petersburg State Technical University, with an M.Sc. in Space Physics in 1988. He subsequently received his Candidate of Sciences degree in Astrophysics from the A.F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of Oulu in 2000. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at INFN Milano from 1997 to 1999, where he worked on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment, he joined the University of Oulu in 2000 as Head of the Oulu Cosmic Ray Station, becoming Docent in 2002 and Full Professor of Space Physics in 2012. From 2014 to 2019, he served as Vice-Director of the ReSoLVE Centre of Excellence of the Academy of Finland, dedicated to research on solar long-term variability and its effects. A Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2019, he currently serves as Vice President of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and as a member of Commission C4 (Astroparticle Physics) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). His contributions have been recognised through the First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland (2013), the Julius Bartels Medal of the European Geosciences Union (2018), and the ISEE Science Award of Japan (2020).

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Professor Usoskin’s research has focused on long-term solar variability, the heliospheric modulation of cosmic rays, and the effects of energetic solar and galactic particles on the terrestrial environment, with particular emphasis on reconstructing solar activity over millennial timescales using cosmogenic isotopes preserved in tree rings, ice cores, and meteorites. His work has contributed to the development of reliable calibration methods for historical sunspot records and to quantitative modelling of cosmic-ray-induced ionisation in the atmosphere, providing important tools for investigating long-term solar activity and its influence on the near-Earth environment. He has authored 391 peer-reviewed publications, with an h-index of 50 and more than 9,600 citations, including three papers published in Nature and Science. His selected works address the reconstruction of sunspot numbers over the past millennium, comparisons of recent solar activity with the preceding 11,000 years, heliospheric modulation of cosmic rays from 1951 to 2004, cosmic-ray-induced atmospheric ionisation, and extreme solar particle storms. Collectively, these contributions reflect a sustained research programme connecting fundamental solar and heliospheric physics with the study of long-term space-climate variability, space-weather phenomena, and the radiation environment surrounding Earth.