Călin Alexandru UR has been the director of Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics, Romania since 2020. He is also the associated professor at the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania. His fields of interest include experimental study of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions; high resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy and particle spectroscopy; nuclear lifetimes measurements; mass spectrometry; data acquisition systems; gamma beam systems, etc.,, He is the co-author to more than 400 papers published in scientific journals indexed in ISI-Web of Science and to more than 140 papers published in conference proceedings books.

Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics (ELI–NP) is the nuclear physics pillar of the pan–European Extreme Light Infrastructure project and it was implemented on the Măgurele National Physics Platform in Romania. A rich science program was established within a large international collaboration with the aim to advance the field of Nuclear Photonics.

The basic scientific research aims to reveal the mechanisms underlying the acceleration of particles driven by high-power lasers and to enable exotic nuclear physics experiments under plasma conditions to reproduce the evolution of the stellar environment in the laboratory. An extensive biomedical research program, anchored in ELI-NP's unique capabilities, is currently being developed and addresses topics such as: radiotherapy-relevant nuclear beam production, radiobiological effects of laser and gamma nuclear beams, medical imaging research using laser-driven X-ray sources and medical isotope production research.

The high–power laser system is operational since 2020 and a thorough program of experimental setups commissioning was performed since then. The experimental setups at 100 TW and 1 PW laser powers were successfully commissioned and are available for users. The intense gamma beam system is under construction and will start operation in 2026. The experimental setups for the gamma beam were implemented providing state–of–the–art devices for nuclear physics studies.