Dr. Aleksei Aksimentiev received his Master's degree in physics from Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (Ukraine), and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland. After a brief postdoctoral training at Mitsui Chemicals, Japan, he joined the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, Urbana, IL, as a postdoctoral research associate.  In 2005, he became a faculty member of the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, where he is currently a professor of physics. His research interests include biological and synthetic DNA systems, nanopore sequencing, and molecular mechanisms of viral infection.