He’s a WVU physics professor who can mimic the Northern Lights in his Hodges Hall lab — while also spraying shaving cream on wadded-up foil, to suggest Earth’s electromagnetic field.
And now Mark Koepke is taking his academic act to Germany.
Koepke was named a 2020 Mercator Fellow to Ruhr University in Bochum, a former coal-mining town near The Netherlands in western Germany.
The professor will spend several weeks collaborating on research projects related to his field of plasma physics.
Plasma, by his field’s out-of-this-world definition, isn’t the blood product.
It is, rather, the high-speed streams of energy that constantly shoot from the sun.
Plasma, as generated by the star, is our universe’s “fourth state” of matter.
Here’s how the principle works with water: When heat is applied to solid ice, for example, the ice melts and turns into liquid.
More heat reduces that liquid to steam, or gas.
And more heat after that eventually transforms that gas into plasma — matter’s fourth state.
Researchers at Ruhr are known for employing the same creativity as Koepke in their quest for the thesis.
One recent study was able to scientifically determine that the two hemispheres of a drummer’s brain are “cabled” differently than someone who doesn’t play such an instrument.
Koepke, who has been a visiting professor in Austria and England, plus other universities in Germany, launched WVU’s plasma physics program in 1987.
He has also done research for NASA.
After high school, the once-and-future professor earned an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he intended on studying marine biology.
That plan ran aground, though, when he learned the academy didn’t offer that discipline.
He decided to pursue physics instead.
In 2008, he was dying.
Only he didn’t know it.
Nearly 30 years before, he had been badly injured in a car crash.
He lost his spleen and contracted Hepatitis C through a transfusion of tainted blood.
Koepke needed a liver transplant — and one came through.
Now, his four grown sons tease him about his professor-penchant for using a no-frills, utilitarian chalkboard for just about any discourse.
If Koepke is talking about the weather, or the fortunes of WVU football, he uses the board.
The board is especially employed, if the subject is plasma physics.
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