“One of the things that you get good at while at MIT,” says PSFC research scientist Sara Ferry, “is being able to start from nothing on a particular system or skill and knowing how to approach it in a way that’s effective.”
Alessandro Marinoni has continued to examine an innovative plasma shape, dubbed “negative triangularity,” extending previous research to configurations more compatible with the plasma environment of a reactor.
MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) graduate student Steven Jepeal has been awarded a Second Place prize in the 2021 Innovations in Nuclear Technology R&D Awards.
After overseeing three years of research and development, Brian LaBombard is ready to test a toroidal field model coil (TFMC), a prototype for those that will be used in the new fusion experiment, SPARC.
NSE PhD student, Leigh Ann Kesler who studies at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, dates her interest in fusion from an 11th-grade persuasive writing assignment. Inspired in part by her father’s interest in the potential of nuclear energy, she decided to investigate fusion.
PSFC graduate student Leigh Ann Kesler's main focus is erosion of materials inside fusion devices, in which strong magnetic fields keep the hot plasma fuel confined and away from the walls of the vacuum chamber where fusion reactions occur.
“It’s our responsibility to get beyond our walls and have a positive impact in the world”, says newly appointed assistant professor of nuclear sicnece and engineering Zach Hartwig.
When she was 16, Monica Pham mapped out her future. “My chemistry teacher was talking about how atoms could generate unlimited power,” recalls Pham. “I asked her what kind of person worked in this field, and when she said a nuclear engineer, I decided that’s what I wanted to be.”