Dr. Kusnezov currently serves as Deputy Under Secretary for Artificial Intelligence & Technology at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dr. Kusnezov received A.B. degrees in Physics and in Pure Mathematics with highest honors from UC Berkeley. Following a year of research at the Institut fur Kernphysik, KFA-Julich, in Germany, he attended Princeton University earning his MS in Physics and Ph.D. in theoretical physics.

At Michigan State University, he conducted postdoctoral research and then became an Instructor. He joined the faculty of Yale University as an assistant professor in theoretical physics, becoming an associate professor and has served as a visiting professor at numerous universities around the world. Dr. Kusnezov has published over 100 articles and edited 2 books. After more than a decade at Yale, he left academia to pursue federal service at the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and became a member of the Senior Executive Service. He has served in multiple positions within the NNSA, and was also nominated by the President to serve in the NNSA. While leading NNSA’s high performance computing program, he was responsible for delivering the world’s fastest supercomputers over many years including delivering on the DOE 10-year grand challenge for a 100 Teraflop supercomputer, the novel Blue Gene supercomputer architecture family, and the first petaflop supercomputer that was also a hybrid system with graphics accelerators, among others.

Today he is focused on leading the DOE’s efforts in advancing artificial intelligence broadly across all of its mission, operational and business functions.