Elena Khomenko is PhD in Physics and Math from Main Astronomical Observatory in Kiev (Ukraine) and is a Research scientist at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC,  Spain). Since the defense of her PhD Thesis in 2004, Elena carried out scientific research at the IAC. She had several successive Post Doctoral positions, followed by a prestigious fellowship under the program “Ramon y Cajal” funded by Spanish Ministry of Science. She was successful in obtaining funding from the European Research Council for this research line throughout the Starting Grant in 2011 and Consolidating Grant in 2017. She maintains active collaborations with several institutes worldwide (e.g. Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Studies, Germany; Stanford University and NSF in USA; Monash University, Australia; University of Dublin, Ireland; Northumbria University and Sheffield University in UK; KU of Leuven, Belgium). She has spent around 24 months in research visits to these institutes over her scientific career, including a sabbatical stay at the Monash University (Australia) under The Gordon Preston fellowship in 2017-2018. She co-directed to completion 3 PhD theses, and two more on the way, on numerical modeling of waves and instabilities in the solar atmosphere. Since 2012 she has been teaching lecture courses on Fluid Dynamics and Solar Physics at the University of La Laguna for undergraduate and Master students.

Elena has been mostly working in the field of Solar Physics, MHD wave theory, theory of partially ionized plasmas, quiet Sun magnetic fields, and spectropolarimetry. One of Elena’s research lines is the study of the interaction of solar waves and magnetic structures. The main milestone of this line is the creation of a numerical code Mancha3D, a non-linear code that solves equations of non-ideal MHD in three spatial dimensions including realistic ingredients, at the level of state-of-the-art codes in the field of Solar Physics. Her current interests focus on the investigation of the influence of partial ionization of the solar plasma onto the processes of energy propagation and release.