Paulo Alves

Paulo Alves obtained his PhD in Plasma Physics at the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2015. His research aims to understand the fundamental plasma processes that occur in extreme astrophysical environments (including those governing the generation and amplification of magnetic fields, and the acceleration of high-energy particles), and in high-energy-density laboratory experiments (including nonlinear optics in plasma, and the interplay between kinetic processes and hydrodynamic instabilities). He utilizes a combination of analytic theory and massively parallel kinetic plasma simulations to understand the nonlinear and multi-scale dynamics of plasmas in these systems from a first-principles perspective. He is also interested in combining modern techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with traditional theoretical and computational techniques from Plasma Physics to develop advanced computational algorithms for multi-scale plasma modeling, and to accelerate scientific insight from the increasingly complex and abundant data being produced by state-of-the-art plasma simulations and experiments.