The Aksimentiev Group

I received my B.S. in Physics from the Nizhny Novgorod State University, Russia in 2005 and Ph.D. in Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL in 2009. My thesis research was focused on far-from-equilibrium emergent behavior in ensembles of magnetic microparticles suspended at liquid-air interfaces. Together with Igor Aronson, Alexey Snezhko, and Andreas Glatz, I studied the phenomenon experimentally and theoretically. Computer simulations based on developed theoretical models successfully described self-organization and self-propulsion of observed surface structures (magnetic "snakes"). These simulations were among the first scientific modeling exercises carried out on CUDA-enabled GPUs that allowed us to achieve a 100-fold speedup compared to parallel C++ code on the fastest CPU available at the moment. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I work together with Aleksei Aksimentiev on molecular systems that incorporate novel inorganic materials and nanostructures such as graphene membranes and plasmonic nanopores. I make use of all-atom molecular dynamics (MD), atomic-resolution Brownian dynamics (ARBD), and continuum modeling (COMSOL) to understand how man-made nanoscale molecular devices function. Google Scholar Profile