Dr. Shadia Habbal

Shadia lives in Honolulu where she is a Professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai’i.  She was born and raised in Damascus, Syria, where she attended the University of Damascus. She then attended the University of Beirut before moving to the US.  She earned her Doctorate degree in Physics from the University of Cincinnati. Shadia’s love of physics and the Sun has taken her to different parts of the world to observe the Sun’s corona during total solar eclipses.  She began studying the Sun and planned a trip to observe the total solar eclipse in India in 1995, thus beginning the history of the Solar Wind Sherpas. Shadia’s research expertise is in diagnostic approaches for exploring the physics of the corona, solar wind and coronal mass ejections, using imaging and spectroscopic observations from total solar eclipses.  She has led 20 scientific eclipse expeditions, with the latest ones involving multiple observing sites.