Alex Melin earned his M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Missouri in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tennessee in 2008. He has been a member of IEEE for 6 years and a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society for 3 years. He has been a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 2010 where he has worked on the development of high-temperature magnetic bearings for molten salt reactors, cyber-physical security, power grid control and optimization, and other projects developing and applying advanced control theory to a wide range of energy and manufacturing applications. Alex Melin is serving as the Vice-Chair of the IEEE East Tennessee Section in 2018.