Ing. Ivana Kolmašová, Ph.D.

Ivana Kolmašová is a senior research scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences, since 2020, and a research scientist at Charles University since 2015. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics of Plasmas from the Czech Technical University, Prague (2014) and an Ing. in Radio Electronics (1987).

Her career began at the Geophysical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1987-1994), followed by roles as a research engineer (1994-2014) and research scientist (2014-2019) at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics.

Her research focuses on lightning processes and thunderstorms, electromagnetic waves in planetary magnetospheres, and developing radio receivers for spacecraft missions and stratospheric balloons. She is a member of international teams of currently operating spacecraft missions of ESA being also involved in instrument development efforts of new scientific spacecraft projects. She currently serves as a Co-Principal Investigator of the instrument for the Comet Interceptor mission to a pristine comet and a member of the ESA Science Study Team for the future M-Matisse mission to Mars. She has led or collaborated on numerous research projects funded by Czech and European institutions. She was part of the award-winning team contributing to the ESA Solar Orbiter mission. She is an associate editor of the Scientific Reports journal from the Nature journals family and reviews regularly for leading scientific journals.

Her research achievements include the first detection of rapid whistlers and low-density holes in the Jovian ionosphere, first detection of gamma glows at low altitudes, and significant contributions to lightning initiation studies. She also identified transient luminous events called elves in small-scale thunderstorms and analyzed disruptions in lightning weather patterns due to climatic phenomena. She is the author or co-author of 74 scientific articles in refereed journals with 755 citations.

She teaches and supervises students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University. Her committee service includes the Czech Science Foundation’s P209 evaluation panel (2021-2025), WMO’s lightning extremes committee; she is a president of the Czech National Committee of International Union of Radio Science URSI and a secretary of the Atmospheric and Space electricity section of the American Geophysical Union AGU. She actively promotes science through public talks and articles in popular science magazines.