Alexei Poludnenko received his Ph.D. degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Rochester. After graduation, he was a member of the Department of Energy ASC Flash Center at the University of Chicago, where he worked on the physics of Type Ia supernovae. Subsequently, Dr. Poludnenko spent almost a decade at the US Naval Research Laboratory as a research staff member, and at the Texas A&M University as an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Currently, Dr. Poludnenko is an Associate Professor at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Connecticut. His research includes theoretical and computational studies of complex multi-physics reacting and non-reacting flows in terrestrial and astrophysical systems, numerical algorithm development for computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance computing.