Axel Brandenburg

Professor Axel Brandenburg received his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1990. After two postdocs at Nordita in Copenhagen and at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder/Colorado, he returned to Nordita as Assistant Professor for just over a year before he went in 1996 as a full Professor of Applied Mathematics to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 2000 he moved again to Nordita as a full professor. He became a professor at the Department of Astronomy in Stockholm when Nordita moved from Denmark to Sweden in 2007. In 2009 he received a European Research Council Advanced Grant on Astrophysical Dynamos. In 2014 he was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and in 2015 he was appointed a visiting professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder for three years, supported through a George Ellery Hale visiting faculty appointment. In 2019 Brandenburg was awarded an honorary professorship at Ilia State University. He collaborates closely with members of the Cosmology and Gravitation group (School of Natural Sciences and Medicine) and co-supervises Ph.D. students. He also serves as an international advisor of the projects at Ilia State University funded through the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia.

Axel Brandenburg is working in the field of astrophysical fluid dynamics. He is also interested in selected topics of astrobiology, particularly the question of homochirality at the origin of life. His main interests are concerned with magnetic field generation from turbulent motions with applications to the Sun and stars, accretion discs, galaxies, and the early Universe. He produced the first compressible dynamo simulations in 1992. His work on accretion disc turbulence of 1995 was the first to show that the magneto-rotational and dynamo instabilities lead to sustained doubly-positive feedback. The idea that large-scale primordial fields are the result of an inverse cascade goes back to his initial work of 1996. In 2005, he developed the concept of a distributed solar dynamo shaped by the near-surface shear layer. He contributed to discovering several new dynamo effects and found the production of magnetic spots as a generic result of stratification in hydromagnetic turbulence. Since 2011, he developed and applied new methods of determining magnetic helicity at the solar surface and in the solar wind. His work on the interpretation of stellar activity cycles revealed that all late-type stars younger than 2.3 billion years exhibit two cycle periods. He is also responsible for the maintenance of the Pencil Code, which is a public domain code (URL: https://github.com/pencil-code) for solving partial differential equations on massively parallel machines. One of the new applications concerns gravitational waves from the early Universe.

Brandenburg has published 440 refereed papers and has an h-index 68 on ADS. He has supervised 13 PhD students, of which 6 are now in academic positions. Maarit Korpi-Lagg (née Korpi, Mantere, and Kapyla) is now a Professor at Aalto University in Finland, for example.