Before taking his current position at UofA, Petr Nikrityuk was the head of the research group Interphase Phenomena within the Center for Innovation Competence VIRTUHCON at the Technische Universit?t Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF), Germany. He studied mechanical engineering at the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), where he obtained his PhD on the topic of mathematical modeling of thermal processes. Before taking his research group leader position in Freiberg, Petr Nikrityuk worked as software developer in the field of computational fluid dynamics and as a post doc fellow in the Institute for Aerospace Engineering at the Dresden University of Technology.