Photo of Aliaksandr Melnichenka

Aliaksandr (Alex) Melnichenka

I'm a physics and mathematics major at Berea College, graduating in May 2027 and applying to PhD programs in theoretical astrophysics and physics for fall 2027. I'm most interested in magnetized turbulence. With Alex Lazarian at UW-Madison and Dmitri Pogosyan at Alberta, I work on new statistical measures of interstellar magnetic turbulence from radio polarization and test them against MHD simulations. I also study electron hydrodynamics in graphene with Leonid Levitov at MIT, and the thermal and orbital history of Europa with Jim Fuller at Caltech. Earlier, I worked on dark matter kinetic theory in Mark Vogelsberger's group at MIT's Kavli Institute. A first-author paper in The Astrophysical Journal (2026), a co-first-author manuscript in revision at Physical Review Letters, and two papers in preparation.

At 16, before AI could solve olympiad problems, I started SavchenkoSolutions.com, which now has over a million page views from over 100,000 readers in nearly 150 countries. I led more than 100 volunteers in crowdsourcing human-written solutions to all 2,023 physics problems of Savchenko's Problems in Physics, finishing in October 2026. I also founded BelSO.org, the largest olympiad preparation platform in Belarus.

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Belarus Science Olympiad Infrastructure (BelSO)
Savchenko Solutions

Publications

  1. A. Melnichenka, A. Lazarian, D. Pogosyan. "Recovering 3D Magnetic Turbulence from Single-frequency Faraday Screens". The Astrophysical Journal 1011, 16 (2026). doi 10.3847/1538-4357/aeac22.

  2. 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)

  3. A. Melnichenka, A. Lazarian, D. Pogosyan. "Numerical Tests of Directional Statistics and Polarization Zeros in Mixed Emitting and Faraday-Rotating Turbulence". (In preparation for The Astrophysical Journal, 2026)

  4. A. Melnichenka, A. Bagheri, J. Fuller. "Has Europa Always Hosted an Ocean?" (In preparation, 2026)

Awards and Fellowships

  • LeRoy Apker Award nominee, Berea College's nominee for the APS undergraduate research award (2026)
  • Emergent Ventures Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University (2026)
  • Caltech SURF Fellow with Prof. Jim Fuller (Summer 2026)
  • Sigma Pi Sigma, national physics honor society (inducted 2026)
  • William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, rank 541 of 4,329, top 13 percent (2025)

In the News

LEX 18 (NBC), "Berea College Student Builds Free Science Education Platforms" (April 2026)