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 (2000). After two years as a post-doctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship through the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., but was stationed at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in 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. In 2015, he joined the Physics Department at USF as an Associate Professor. His research interests are in advanced characterization of magnetic and multi-functional materials, nanomagnetism, ultrafast magnetization dynamics, and x-ray spectroscopy.