MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Research Scientist Maria Gatu-Johnson has been elected a Kavli Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
MIT Postdoctoral Associate Erika Ye has been awarded a Luis W. Alvarez Fellowship in Computer Sciences from the Berkeley Lab of Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
Rishabh Datta’s main focus is, “Can we create this high energy plasma that is moving supersonically in a laboratory, and can we study it? And can we learn things that are hard to diagnose in an astrophysical plasma?”
The PSFC journeyed to the Young Women's Conferemce at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory to inspire young women to consider science as a field of study and a career.
Recent MIT graduate Francesco Sciortino (MIT PhD’21) has been honored with the 2022 Piovesan Award for the best PhD thesis in "physics of controlled fusion."
Johan Frenje, head of the PSFC High-Energy-Density Physics Division, former Division Head Richard Petrasso and Research Scientist Maria Gatu-Johnson share, with other team members, the Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award for achieving ignition and energy gain larger than 1.0.
On that morning of December 5, for the first time ever, the lasers delivered 2.1. megajoules of energy and yielded 3.15 megajoules in return, achieving an historic fusion energy gain well above 1—a result verified by diagnostic tools developed by the MIT PSFC.
“When I look up at the moon with my sweetheart, my wife of 48 years, I imagine that streaming from its dark side are electron holes that my students and I predicted and that we then discovered,” says Ian Hutchinson. “It’s quite sentimental to me.”