Aliaksandr Melnichenka

I'm a physicist at Berea College. I work on three problems: electron hydrodynamics in graphene with Leonid Levitov at MIT, magnetic turbulence diagnostics with Alex Lazarian at UW-Madison, and dark matter dynamics with Mark Vogelsberger at MIT's Kavli Institute. Two first-author papers are at journals (PRL, ApJ), a third is in preparation. All code and data are open.

Before college I built BelSO.org and SavchenkoSolutions.com, platforms now used by students in 40+ countries to prepare for physics competitions. I started them in Belarus at 15 when our training program ended. I still run them from Kentucky.

Email:

aliaksandr [at] melnichenka [dot] com aliaksandr@melnichenka.com

Alias:

astrosander

BUSEL-1: Stratospheric Balloon Mission

11 instruments to 28 km. First student-built calibrated polarimeter to the stratosphere. Launching May 7, 2026.

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Publications

A. Melnichenka, A. Lazarian, D. Pogosyan. "Recovering 3D Magnetic Turbulence from Single-Frequency Faraday Screens". arXiv:2602.22204 [astro-ph.GA], 2026.
A. Melnichenka*, P. Liong*, A. Bukhtatyi, A. Bilous, L. Levitov. "Spontaneous Running Waves and Self-Oscillatory Transport in Dirac Fluids". arXiv:2512.16571 [cond-mat.mes-hall], 2025. (* Equal contribution)
A. Melnichenka, X. Shen, V. Tran, M. Vogelsberger. "Phase-Space Diffusion Coefficients for Self-Interacting Dark Matter near Supermassive Black Holes". (In preparation, 2026)

Awards and Fellowships

Emergent Ventures Fellow, Mercatus Center (2026)
Caltech SURF Fellow with Prof. Jim Fuller (Summer 2026)
Sigma Pi Sigma inductee, first sophomore in the 96-year history of Berea's chapter
William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, score 28, top 10% nationally

In the News

LEX 18 (NBC) — "Real Impact: Berea College Student Builds Free Science Education Platforms" (April 2026)