Daniel Vrinceanu, Ph.D

Dr. Vrinceanu was born and raised in Romania. As a student at the “Mihai Viteazul” High School in Ploiesti, he was awarded the bronze medal at the International Physics Olympiad held in London. This academic competition is the equivalent of the Olympic Games for sports and involves the very best students who represent their own countries. Immediately after obtaining his University degree in Mathematical Physics, he was offered the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Bucharest University.

He obtained his doctoral degree in Theoretical Atomic Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The problem treated in his PhD Thesis made a significant theoretical contribution, providing an elegant and efficient solution to an outstanding problem incapable of being solved for more than 40 years. In recognition, he was awarded the Sigma-Xi award of Best Ph.D Thesis 2001, and he was selected for the Thesis Prize of the American Physical Society of Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP).

At the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Dr. Vrinceanu was the leader in a theoretical investigation of strongly magnetized antihydrogen atoms, aimed to clarify understanding and interpretation of the recent experiments at the European Center for Nuclear Reseach (CERN) by Harvard scientists. Their results on formation and electric field ionization of highly excited anti-hydrogen atoms are groundbreaking and completely changed the way the experimental data is analyzed. For the utmost importance of the research, their work published in Physical Review Letters was featured on the journal cover. Dr. Vrinceanu was granted the prestigious Director Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on large-scale Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics Simulations of cold magnetized and un-magnetized plasmas.