Dr. Yuri Ralchenko is the Leader of the Atomic Spectroscopy Group at NIST. His research is focused on spectroscopy of highly-charged ions, analysis of atomic processes in plasmas with emphasis on accurate modeling of plasma population kinetics, development of Internet atomic databases, and other aspects of plasma and atomic spectroscopy. This work includes collisional-radiative modeling of diverse plasmas (including non-Maxwellian and transient ones), production and assessment of accurate atomic data (energies, oscillator strengths, collisional cross sections, etc.), and development of methods and standards for uncertainty quantification and dissemination of scientific data.
Dr. Ralchenko is an Editorial Board member of several scientific journals, has authored over 150 scientific publications, and has been a speaker at numerous national and international conferences. He also is a frequent consultant at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a co-director of a series of Schools on atomic and plasma spectroscopy organized jointly by IAEA and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and a Chairman of the series of Non-LTE Code Comparison Workshops.
2009: Fellow of the American Physical Society for "significant contributions to the relativistic theory of highly-charged ions and collisional-radiative modeling, and through creation of online codes and databases for the atomic physics community"
2015: NIST Judson C. French Award for "establishing the world's premier resource for atomic reference data, relied upon for everything from nuclear forensics to Hubble Space Telescope data analysis"
2022: NIST PML Excellence in Cooperation, Collaboration, and Teamwork Award for "for development and deployment of a unique wide-band high-resolution microcalorimeter for precise x-ray spectroscopy of highly-charged ions"