Welcome!
I am Emre Işık (pron. ‘Ishik’), currently a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. Between 2019-2023 I worked as an associate professor of astroinformatics at the Dept. of Computer Science, Turkish-German University, in Beykoz, Istanbul, Türkiye.
Through numerical simulations and data analysis, I explore the physical mechanisms (mostly through MHD simulations) underlying the observed magnetic activity patterns on the Sun and other Sun-like stars, in comparison with observations. When I am not wrangling with models in the theoretical world of wonders, I contribute observational studies of stellar magnetic activity. Thanks to my recent years of teaching and supervising in (astro)informatics, I enriched my toolbox with machine-learning methods. In a recent excursion to astrobiology, I worked on modelling thermodynamics of organic reaction networks in ocean-world interiors. Click on the links below to see my research summaries.
📚 See also my live bibliography.
I am serving as the elected vice president of the Inter-Division Commission E4 “Impact of Magnetic Activity on Solar and Stellar Environments” of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
🚨 NEWS – In June 2025, I co-organised an ISSI Workshop at the International Space Science Institute (Bern, Switzerland), entitled Stellar Magnetism and its Impact on (Exo)planets. Nowadays I am leading a book chapter on stellar magnetic activity.
🚨 NEWS (12.01.2026) – The Turkish-Japanese joint research project Exploring The Connection Between Chromospheric Activity and Starspots in Late-Type Active Stars: Implications for Dynamo Evolution (2026-2028) has been awarded funding from TUBITAK and JSPS! I am a consultant and collaborator in the project, co-led by H.V. Şenavcı (Ankara University) and D. Nogami (Kyoto University).
You can follow me on Twitter and ResearchGate, or write to me directly: isik (mps.mpg.de).
🔭 Research
💦 Astrobiology of ocean worlds
My bibliography at NASA/ADS and at SciX by ADS.
- Recent/current collaborators
- S.K. Solanki, N.A. Krivova, R.H. Cameron, MPI f. Solar System Research, A.I. Shapiro and the SOLVe/REVEAL group;
- H.V. Şenavcı, Ankara University
- N.-E. Nemec, ICE, CSIC, Barcelona, Spain
- C. Pezzotti, University of Liège, Belgium
- M. Melwani Daswani, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
- Past collaborators
- M. Schüssler (PhD advisor), D. Schmitt, V. Holzwarth, MPI for Solar System Research
- J. Jiang, Beihang University, China
🏛️ Teaching
🧑🏻🏫 Courses I gave along my career
🖋️ Picture at the top of the page: detail from a Hittite Sun Disc replica (photo: E. Işık, location: home!).
🖋️ Check out Astronomy Picture of the Day
Contact
🏫 Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
📧 isik (mps.mpg.de)
☎️ +49-551-384979-402