David Neil Ruzic is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after 41 years on the Faculty. He received his PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 1984 and then did post-doctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. His research centers on the interaction of plasmas with materials. He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE). In 2020 he won the International Gaede-Langmuir award from the AVS and the Fusion Technology Prize from IEEE. In 2024 he won the Prize for Excellence in Plasma Science and Engineering sponsored by the University of Michigan. He has published over 230 referred journal papers, 2 books, and 6 book chapters and has been awarded 12 patents. He has produced 39 PhD students and 63 thesis MS students. His current group consists of 1 research professor, 1 postdoc, 16 graduate and 35 undergraduate research assistants. In 2017, he headed the effort to bring a mid-sized hybrid stellarator / tokamak to Illinois, now called HIDRA, capable of 1 Tesla fields with a minor radius of 19 cm and a major radius of 72 cm. In 2020, he founded the Illinois Plasma Institute located on the UIUC Research Park which he still directs. It is funded by industry to do translational research. In parallel he started a Masters of Engineering in Plasma Engineering degree program which is closely coupled to industry. He is known on YouTube as “Illinois EnergyProf” with 100k subscribers and over 10 million views.