Dmitri M. Orlov

I am an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Energy Research and an Educator in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California San Diego. I am also an Affiliate Professor at the Department of Physics at Auburn University.

I received my B.S. with Honors in 1998 and M.S. with Honors in 2000 in Applied Physics and Mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. My M.S. Thesis was focused on the numerical simulations of transonic flows around axisymmetric and 2D bodies.

I earned my Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN), where I did pioneering research on aerodynamic plasma actuators for aerodynamic flow control. In my thesis, "Modeling and Simulation of Single Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma Actuators," I developed the first principle-based engineering models for plasma actuators, verified them against experimental measurements, and demonstrated their application for simulations of flow control on the airfoils. The thesis was referenced in more than 215 papers and was included in Computational Fluid Dynamics textbooks.

After completing my Ph.D., I moved to the Department of Physics at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. I worked on MHD and PIC modeling of the streamers and glow phases of the atmospheric barrier discharges in application to flow control.

I joined UC San Diego's Center for Energy Research in 2008, where I am presently working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. My research is focused on the control of the edge instabilities in high-confinement regimes in present-day tokamaks and future burning plasma devices, including ITER, on transport in the core and edge of the tokamaks under 3D non-axisymmetric perturbation fields, and heat and particle transport to the divertor surfaces.

I published and co-authored over 70 peer-reviewed papers and dozens of conference proceedings papers. My works were referenced more than 5350 times, and my h-index is 32 (as of March 2025).

I am a Vice Chair of MagNetUS (2023), Vice Chair of US TTF (2024-2026), a Coalition for Plasma Science Vice-Chair (2021-present), a member of the US Transport Task Force Executive Committee and Sherwood Fusion Theory Executive Committee (2023-2026), a member of the DIII-D User Board Council (2024-present), and the lead organizer of the Frontier Plasma Science Collaborative Research Facilities Joint Call for Runtime Proposals (2021-2023). I am a past Member-at-Large of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics Executive Committee (2020-2023).

Education

- Ph.D., 2007, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
  - - - University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
- M.S.A.E, 2005, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
  - - - University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
- M.S., 2000, Applied Physics and Mathematics
  - - - Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Zhukovskiy, Russia
- B.S., 1998, Applied Physics and Mathematics
  - - - Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Zhukovskiy, Russia

Work Experience

- University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA (2008 - present)
- US Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO (2006 - 2008)
- University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN (2000 - 2006)
- Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), Zhukovskiy, Russia (1996 - 2000)

Pronouns I use: he, him, his