Alina Kononov
Center for Computing Research, Sandia National Laboratories
Research Focus
Research Interests
About Alina
For her doctoral research, Alina Kononov worked on first-principles modeling of ion-irradiated surfaces and 2D materials. Her contributions enabled predictive calculations of ion-induced electron emission, uncovered new surface physics, and offered insights for ion beam materials imaging and processing techniques. Alina now holds a postdoctoral appointment at Sandia National Labs, where she continues to develop and apply cutting-edge methods to model excited electron dynamics. Her current projects involve advancing modeling capabilities for warm dense matter and exploring prospects of near-term quantum computing for simulating excited electrons. Her broad research interests span electronic structure theory and its applications, including time-dependent density functional theory, quantum simulation, materials physics, and high-energy density science.
Honors
2022 - APS Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics
2020 - APS Division of Computational Physics Travel Award
2020 - APS Division of Materials Physics Ovshinsky Travel Award
2016 - UIUC Outstanding Teaching Assistant
2015 - UIUC Excellent Teaching Assistant
Education
Postdoc
Center for Computing Research, Sandia National Laboratories, 08/2020
Ph.D.
Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 08/2020
Bachelor's
Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 06/2014
