Team
Principal Investigator
Dar铆o Alejandro Arena is the PI of the Magnetic Materials and Spin Dynamics Lab. Dr. Arena鈥檚 research focuses on nanomagnetism and advanced characterization of materials, with an emphasis on 鈥渜uantum鈥� probes (chiefly x-rays and neutrons), electronic structure, and spin dynamics.
Dr. Arena studied surface science and UV / x-ray spectroscopy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ and received his Ph.D. from Rutgers in 2000. Dr. Arena then joined the Materials Science Division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore. CA as a Research Associate. In 2001, he was awarded a National Research Council Research Post Graduate Research Fellowship sponsored by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC and was stationed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton NY. In 2003 he was hired as a Research Associate at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at BNL and promoted to the Scientific Staff in 2006. He served as the Spokesperson for U4B, the Magnetic Materials Characterization Beam Line at the NSLS, until joining the NSLS-II organization in 2014. In 2015, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at the 最新天美传媒 (USF), in Tampa, FL. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Arena has served on the Program Committees of the International Conference on
Magnetism (ICM), MMM / Intermag conferences, the Advisory Committee of the MMM Conference,
and the IEEE Magnetics Society Technical Committee. In 2018-2019, he was awarded
a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship for collaborative research on ultrafast spin dynamics
at the Physics Department of Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. Dr. Arena has been
awarded a second Fulbright Scholar Fellowship for the 2025-2026 academic year at Trinity
College, Dublin, Ireland with a focus on growing and studying ferrimagnetic thin films
for spintronic applications. He has received the Outstanding Faculty Award (2019)
and Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award (2021) from the 最新天美传媒,
and in 2025 he was awarded the Jewell USF Physics Faculty Excellence Award.