Rate My Professor Michael Wheatland

Professor Michael Wheatland serves as Professor in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney and as Associate Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Science. He completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Sydney in 1995, with a thesis entitled 'Some Topics in the Physics of Solar Flares.' With over 30 years of experience in research within solar astrophysics, his academic interests encompass the physics of solar flares, coronal mass ejections, magnetic reconnection, magnetic helicity in the solar atmosphere, solar activity forecasting, and nonlinear force-free magnetic field extrapolation for modeling the solar corona. Wheatland is affiliated with the Sydney Institute for Astronomy and has taught physics and computational science courses for more than 25 years. His career at the University of Sydney includes appointments as Senior Lecturer in Computational Science, Associate Professor from January 2009 to December 2018, and Professor from 2019 to the present. Since 2021, he has led educational initiatives as Associate Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Science.

Wheatland has obtained funding through several Australian Research Council Discovery Projects, including DP220102201 (2022, $360,000, with Professor Andrew Melatos on stochastic processes in neutron star magnetospheres), DP160102932 (2016, $468,404), and DP0345144 (2003). Notable publications feature his PhD thesis (1995), co-editorship of 'Low-Frequency Waves in Space Plasmas' (2016, with Andreas Keiling and Octav Marghitu), 'Electric Currents in the Solar Atmosphere' (2018 chapter), 'Prediction of solar flares using unique signatures of magnetic field images' (Astrophysical Journal, 2017, with A. Raboonik et al.), 'Principle of minimum energy in magnetic reconnection in a self-organized critical model for solar flares' (Astrophysical Journal, 2018, with N. Farhang et al.), and contributions to flare waiting-time distributions and solar cycle predictions. He has served as an Editor-in-Chief for the journal Solar Physics, participates in the International Astronomical Union, and contributes to accreditation efforts via the Australian Institute of Physics. Wheatland supervises PhD students on solar corona modeling and flare prediction topics.