Andrey Sushko, PhD

Andrey Sushko is co-founder and chief technology officer at WindBorne Systems, which leverages balloon technology for improving weather forecasts.

Sushko has a passion for understanding how complex phenomena arise from relatively basic underlying principles, whether it’s the diverse dynamics of fluid surfaces that result from simple energy minimization or the engineering solutions produced by evolutionary algorithms.

As a doctoral student at Harvard University, he focused on controllable, engineered quantum systems at the interface between condensed matter and AMO physics. Throughout his work, Sushko remained involved in a student-led engineering project he started during his undergrad at Stanford University, which focused on developing long-endurance altitude-controlled balloons.

Sushko graduated from Stanford University in 2016 with a bachelors in theoretical physics and in mathematics. As an undergraduate, he directed that interest toward exploring the host of phenomena that emerge in seemingly simple condensed matter systems. Sushko worked with Dr. David Goldhaber-Gordon to experimentally probe the interactions of electrons in moiré graphene, a regime where the addition of a hexagonal superlattice over the graphene lattice produces a fractal electronic energy structure. By independently controlling the electron density on two sides of a junction, he was able to study previously unexplored interactions between edge states in this material.

Sushko was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, before living in the United Kingdom for nine years and then moving to the U.S. in 2009.