Dario A. Arena was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and grew up in New York City. He obtained a B.A. degree in Political Science from Williams College, MA and a Ph.D. in physics from Rutgers University, NJ, where he studied surface science and UV / x-ray spectroscopy. After two years as a post-doctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he was awarded a National Research Council Research Post Graduate Research Fellowship sponsored by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC and was stationed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton NY. After serving as a post-doctoral research associate at BNL, he joined the permanent scientific staff of BNL as an Assistant Physicist in 2006, rising to the rank of Physicist in 2010. He served as the Spokesperson for U4B, the Magnetic Materials Characterization Beam Line at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), until joining the NSLS-II organization in 2014. In 2015, he joined the Physics Department at USF as an Associate Professor. His research interests are in development of novel magnetic materials including thin films and nanoparticles, high-frequency / ultrafast spin dynamics, and advanced characterization of magnetic and multi-functional materials using synchrotrons and neutron sources. Dr. Arena has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and is a member of the Technical Committee for the IEEE Magnetics Society. In 2018-2019, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship for collaborative research at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. He has received the Outstanding Faculty Award (2019) and Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award (2021) from the University of South Florida.