Dr. Mejia-Alvarez is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University whose research targets turbulence in regimes where canonical assumptions fail: shock-driven mixing, blast-wave propagation, and flows with strong spatial variation in material properties. He develops ultra-high-speed optical diagnostics — particle image and tracking velocimetry, laser-induced fluorescence, and digital image correlation — that resolve velocity and scalar fields simultaneously in transient and compressible systems, and he designs the facilities that generate those flows, including the Advanced Blast Chamber, the nation's largest university-owned blast chamber, and the Adaptive Viscosity Flow Tunnel, an isothermal platform for turbulence with spatially varying viscosity. At Los Alamos National Laboratory he designed and built the Vertical Shock Tube for the Extreme Fluids Team and studied shock-driven turbulent mixing in support of inertial confinement fusion, work that anchors his emphasis on benchmark-quality datasets for model validation. Within TEMPEST he co-leads the experimental pillar, coordinating measurements that constrain closures across kinetic, fluid, and turbulence descriptions.