 My name is Bill Crossley. I'm the J. William Uregg and Anastasia Vornaz, head of Aeronautics and Astronautics here at Purdue. I'm really excited to introduce my colleague, Alexis Yashuren, as the next associate professor that we're celebrating. I'll take longer while he's getting set up. That'll work well for me. So, Alex joined us in 2015, and he's a slightly different than typical faculty member, that he had a really long career as a research scientist at the George Washington University. And then prior to that, he got his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2008, where he had spent six years as a researcher. And even before that, he worked for the Institute of Applied Physics, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. So, Alex came to us well-prepared as a researcher, and has stepped into the faculty role, doing an outstanding job in our classrooms, and also introducing some neat classroom opportunities and educational opportunities for our students. If you ask me what Alex does, is he works in plasmas. That's his main field. He's a core part of our plasma team here at Purdue. Diagnostics of plasmas, laser-induced plasma for combustion. Does flow control, a little bit of nanotechnology? Perhaps David might want to talk to you a little bit later if he hasn't already about some of your medical applications, including the plasma knife you did a few years ago. Alex has got an outstanding publication record. At least 80 journal articles. There's probably more since I got this information. Presents and conferences regularly. He's a leader in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Plasma Dynamics, and Lasers Technical Committee. So, he's involved in all those activities. At least eight patents for patent applications at this point, three of which I know are in the medical field. Several others have been here since he's been at Purdue with Purdue students and researchers. Graduated several students. I want to highlight a little bit. One of his neat projects, and I think you'll show it, I'm sure, Alex has managed to develop an interesting relationship with General Atomics. So, General Atomics, the company, has been funding Alex to work on something called Trackset, which has opened up a bunch of new opportunities for our students and for Alex. He'll tell you more about that, but that's a neat opportunity that Alex has brought, and it's kind of become a model that we'd like to replicate for others. And his path to being an associate professor, he's developed something that looks like it's a neat approach for others to copy. Alex has taught five different courses for us here at Purdue. He's a fish in our aerodynamics area in our school, so he's taught our introductory aerodynamics class. He's taught our 500 level intermediate aerodynamics class, but the spacecraft electric propulsion is a new class that Alex brought to Purdue that's hugely important to our industry. So Alex is making sure that Purdue's got a footprint there. The plasma laboratory, to our knowledge, it's one of, if not the only laboratory class of its kind teaching students about plasmas in a classroom environment. And then also the Trackset project. And in doing those, Alex always gets rated really highly by the students. So he's an outstanding educator, in addition to his exceptional research record. But rather than do that, let me just introduce Alex. Alex, again, congratulations on your promotion. I'm happy to introduce Alex Shoshuren. Yeah, so at that time, I would say that my physics teacher probably had a very prominent impact on me and introducing me to physics and showing me a beauty of physics and creating the interest in both physics and math. At that time, I was very much interested in participating in physics and math, Olympiads solving the non-standard, more advanced problems, collecting some trophies along the way. This interest brought me to study physics in my hometown institution and I was very lucky and fortunate to be part of this lab. I joined an outstanding school of non-linear optics back in the home institution. And under my advisor, Alexander Sergeev, who is currently, by the way, the president of Russian Academy of Science, I did the work on interaction of at-the-second policies with a matter. Moving forward, we had to switch to a different topic for masters, so we had to do thesis on the Bachel level and then on the master's level. So on the master's level, I switched to another advanced school in the home institution, which was a plasmas and non-linear plasma effects. And I studied some, that one was already a fully laboratory experiment settings to model some ionosphere phenomena. I think that at this point, I fell in love with experiment and by the end of my master, I start feeling that I want to add more of application aspect to the work which I was doing. That was all very interesting and fundamental concepts and I just wanted to add some application story to that. That brought me to Tel Aviv study, a very application-related side of the plasma, plasma science, referring to deposition of film films. This is about the time where I started having some visual evidence and you can see the environment which was around me, that type of various equipment and that always excited me. Well, not always experiments well very well and bring into some degree of frustration sometimes, but overall I realized that I want to continue in the field, speaking seriously of experimental, heavily experimental plasma science. That brought me to my next step in being postdoc and then research scientist at George Washington University. This is the point where I added some aerospace content aspect to my work. We worked with a broad range of various applications, ranging from electric propulsion and for cube satellites, ARCJET facilities to model hypersonic conditions and much more than that including synthesis of non-materials and even biomedical applications. Of course, I want to highlight my primary influencers here including my wife and three kids who came on a different stage of this journey but always provided me help and support and excitement to do what I do. I started as Bill said in Purdue back in 2015 and this is the time when I was fortunate to get resources to establish a lab and we call it electric propulsion and plasma laboratory and you see some student faces here and some equipment which we are in and experimentations that we are working with. Just covering a couple of research areas which we are working, if being asked to name one specific research area out of all we are working which mostly characterize us and which we are mostly known for. I would probably call microwave scattering diagnostics. The idea is coming from Dr. Michael Schneider from Princeton back in 2005 and four years later, I was actually in 2009, I was introduced and met Michael Schneider in the first time and that was quite a life-changing event for me. He became not just a colleague which we collaborate constantly starting that time. In addition to that, he just became an older colleague which I admire a lot and he has substantial impact on my research interest and professional development since then. We expanded quite a bit from 2009 in terms of scattering, doing more start-up with a collision regime and recently doing Thomson scattering regime and applying it for various plasma objects. We develop these technologies through platform technology if we are applicable for many areas of plasma science and engineering. Speaking about filamentation physics, it's a way to detect and measure electron number density and photoionization rates in cross-section which are highly sought in this area. For electric propulsion aerodynamics area combustion, it's a way to measure species in gauze mixtures and this in combination with resonant enhanced multi-photoionization can be done along with a microwave scattering. This is probably one of the fields where we as a lab are most known for and going to other fields. We do micro propulsion for cube satellites and the goal there is to overcome some conventional problems and issues with those referring to limited lifetime. So we are developing a bundle of thruster and ignition system. We are doing a pulse plasma thruster which operates with a liquid propellant along with some special ignition system which allows us also to work on a long extended lifetime. This is another area of research where we operate, actively operate and this is non-second repetitive pulse discharges referring to intense and fast energy deposition into gas with the purpose to modify flow and have both aerodynamic flow control application and combustion application. We are applying a bunch of diagnostics which we already mentioned like a microwave scattering and others. We will go to understand physics of energy deposition and plasma dynamics. This is a short video on a result on a non-second time scale of what we are studying. This is somehow a newer project referring to high power microwaves to couple electromagnetic energy with gas and heat and gas to reach flames of extremely high temperatures. We are talking about 10,000 Kelvin. And those experiments in this field is done to test materials in conditions mimicking hypersonic flight. We have just recently been announced some big of work about that. I'm probably not going to go into details, but we are having a good development for this area as well. Of course, a big part of what we are doing is a teaching and right here at Purdue it was almost odd that a school like Purdue doesn't have the course on a spacecraft electric propulsion which was a very relevant and very natural niche for me. So I started to teach this course covering most conventional and as well as most state-of-the-art electric propulsion techniques. Another course which I could not not to do would be this plasma lap and I was fortunate enough to receive the resources first of all to build all that. So we have several experiments starting from a whole thruster experiment, electrostatic, iron-greed accelerator and some diagnostics like varying from Langmuir probes to microwave interferometry and optical emission spectroscopy. And this is one very special additional course which I was happy to develop at Purdue and it's a truck set design build test. This is a cobstone design course. We are testing various CubeSat related technologies. One of them you can see on this visual for demonstration of coal gas propulsion on a 2D low friction surface enabled by air bearings. Additional portion of what we are doing is a laser communications and you can see on this next video. Let's see if it's working out. Well, it's switched to the third one. The laser communication and establishing a secure link to communicate the video surveillance, say video of the robot through the laser communications. Very special course as Bill mentioned. It's supported by our colleagues from General Atomics and I was very happy to be able to receive these resources and develop this course. With that I want to wrap up and think of course to my Purdue colleagues, Professor Sergey Maturit and Alina Alexenko, they are the two most related to my plasma field, plasma science and technology field and they are, I would say, supporting me on a daily basis. More general support but also tremendous help from John Sullivan and Stephen Collicott and of course help from Tom Shee initially in my tenure track journey and Van Bill Crossley. With that I'd like to thank you and would be happy to answer your questions. Thank you. I think I get the chance to help moderate questions and answers. Are there any questions from the audience here? Let me ask one first, Alex. It's been a journey to get to this point. What was the thing you thought was going to be hard and was easy and what was something that was easy that you thought, I mean, on the inverse, I think I just said that the wrong way. But we all look back at this and go, I thought this was going to be hard and turned out that was easy and I thought this was going to be easy and this was a little harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the easiest as coming as an experimentator was, of course, to build a lab and put together all these courses, both lecture and experimental, especially plasma lab. It turned out that it took about a year to get a space and get everything established in a lab and provide electricity and the necessary supplies to the lab. So that took a little bit more time than I thought initially. That's about what was thought easy and turned out to be a little bit harder. Yeah, in terms of what was hard, well, it's been a not very easy process to get funding for the project, especially given that experiment is a little bit delayed due to this development of the lab. And well, I would say that it didn't turn easier when I thought, so it was equivalently hard as I thought, but I was very fortunate to get in this context with industrial colleagues and referring to a previous talk in the real world application that is helping a lot actually to reach out to those folks in industry and learn about actual problems that you can tackle in a lab. So what is your favorite class to teach, Alex? Is it the plasma lab? I think that's going to be my guess. It is really, really hard to answer. I think, yeah, being again an experimentator, it's between a plasma lab and a track set. All right. I don't want to dominate the whole thing. So let's congratulate Alex. Congratulations on your promotion, Alex. Happy to have you here as part of our team. Thank you.