Ph.D. Physics CU Boulder, 2014; M.S. North Carolina State University in Aerospace Engineering, B.S. University of North Carolina in Physics: Matt studied wind turbine wakes via Doppler lidar observations and large eddy simulations. He has characterized the performance of lidars (Aitken et al. 2012), developed approaches for quantifying wake characteristics from scanning lidar and CFD models (Aitken et al. 2014 JTech), quantified wakes from nacelle-based lidar (Aitken and Lundquist 2014, JTech), and compared observations to large eddy simulations of a turbine with a generalized actuator disk model (Aitken et al. 2014, JRSE) to observations. After a postdoctoral research position at the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr. Aitken is now a fellow at the Croatan Institute.