Ileyk El Mellah has been an assistant professor at UPC since 2025, after 3 years as faculty at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He previously held an ERC postdoctoral fellowship at CNRS-IPAG in Grenoble where he worked with B. Cerutti. Previously, he was a Marie Curie fellow at the Center for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics at KU Leuven with R. Keppens and L. Decin. His doctoral degree was obtained in 2016 at APC (Paris University). He has authored 36 peer-reviewed publications, including 10 as first author, with an h-index of 22 and more than 1700 citations. His work has been recognized with several competitive grants, including ANID Fondecyt Iniciación. He has supervised and mentored PhD and Master’s students in Chile and Europe. Beyond research, he is an active lecturer, having taught courses in Hydrodynamics, Stellar Astrophysics and Computational Methods, among others. He also engages in outreach, co-authoring a popular science book and participating in radio, podcasts and artistic collaborations.
His research centers on accretion and ejection processes in high-energy astrophysics, with emphasis on compact objects in binary systems. He investigates wind-fed accretion in high-mass X-ray binaries, focusing on clumpy stellar winds, accretion wakes and the formation of wind-captured disks. His computational expertise includes contributions to the public codes MPI-AMRVAC and Zeltron, enabling multi-physics simulations of magnetized plasmas. He has applied these tools to explore magnetic reconnection, particle acceleration and flare activity in neutron star and black hole magnetospheres. His collaborations extend to the ALMA ATOMIUM project on cool evolved stars and the X-wind network, linking massive star evolution with compact object physics. He has secured significant computing time on major European supercomputers (e.g. CINES, TGCC, VSC) to model multi-scale processes from stellar winds to relativistic plasmas. His research also bridges theory with observation, through ESO and ALMA observing programs on Be X-ray binaries, AGB stars and elusive black hole companions. He has co-led international workshops on pulsar evolution. Overall, his work integrates numerical modeling, observational data and collaborative frameworks to advance our understanding of matter transfer and energy release in extreme astrophysical environments.