Professor Vadim Zharnitsky earned his Ph.D. from Rensselaer in 1996. He was director's funded postdoc at Los Alamos National Lab during 1996-1998 and a NSF postdoc at Brown University 1998-2000. He was a staff member at Bell Laboratories 2000-2002, and since 2003 he has been a faculty member in mathematics department, UIUC. His research interests include dynamical systems, Hamiltonian mechanics, dispersive PDEs with application is nonlinear optics.