Awards & Recognitions

Knighthood Designation

Queen Elizabeth knights Steve Cowley (Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images)

Steve Cowley, PPPL director, is honored with knighthood

PPPL Director Steve Cowley has received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II “for services to science and the development of nuclear fusion.” The knighthood was announced in 2018 in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, which recognizes the achievements of extraordinary individuals across the United Kingdom.

“I am personally delighted and humbled,” Cowley said. “I have been privileged to work with many extraordinary people in fusion research. This honor reflects the huge importance of our collective work developing new, clean forms of energy production.”

Cowley, who became the seventh director of PPPL in July, 2018, holds a doctorate in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University and is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He previously was chief executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Research. He most recently was president and professor of physics at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. ☀︎

"This honor reflects the huge importance of our collective work developing new, clean forms of energy production.”

Landmark Recognition

PPPL named an historic mechanical engineering site

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has named PPPL an ASME historic mechanical engineering landmark for its achievements in the quest to develop magnetically controlled fusion energy. The society recognized the Laboratory for its entire body of mechanical engineering achievements since 1951 — achievements that embody a wide range of devices designed and built to test the ability to house and facilitate fusion reactions.

"Innovative engineering is critical to our mission"

PPPL Director Steve Cowley, accepts plaque designating laboratory an historic landmark from Bob Simmons, past president of ASME and former PPPL engineer.

PPPL Director Steve Cowley, left, accepts plaque designating laboratory an historic landmark from Bob Simmons, past president of ASME and former PPPL engineer

The historic achievements embody a wide range of devices designed and built to test the ability to house and facilitate fusion reactions. Included among the experimental machines have been new fabrication techniques that produced a facility with the structural strength and strict mechanical tolerances required to achieve world-record fusion plasma performance. For example, in the mid-1990s PPPL’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) achieved a world record for power using fusion fuel.

The Laboratory has gone on to develop spherical tokamaks, devices shaped like a cored apple that produce relatively high plasma pressure, a key ingredient for fusion reactions, with less magnetic pressure than conventional tokamaks require. This capability could lead to cost-effective future tokamaks.

“We are honored to receive this landmark designation,” said Steve Cowley, director of the Laboratory. “Our mechanical engineers design and build the highly complex machines that our scientists use to explore controlled fusion energy. Innovative engineering is critical to our mission — the delivery of fusion power. This designation is fitting tribute to this Laboratory’s superb engineering achievements.” ☀︎

Physics Research Honors

Nat Fisch

Nat Fisch receives Fusion Power Associates’ Distinguished Career Award

Nat Fisch, associate director for academic affairs at PPPL and professor of astrophysical sciences and director of the Program in Plasma Physics at Princeton University, has received a 2018 Distinguished Career Award from Fusion Power Associates (FPA). The FPA is a research and educational foundation that provides students, media and the public with information about the status of fusion development and other applications of plasma science.

The award recognizes Fisch, whose research has opened new paths in the study of controlled fusion energy and plasma science, for his “many years of dedication to plasma science and its applications in many fields, and to advancing the prospects for fusion power.” It especially notes his “decades of career contributions as a scientist” and “role as an educator of a generation of younger scientists, upon whose shoulders the future of plasma science and fusion depends.”

Fisch expressed gratitude for the recognition and said, “I am honored to receive this award, yet the notion of a career award carries for me a scary connotation of finality or completion for which I am hopelessly unready. Hence, I was particularly heartened by the example set by Steve Cowley, who, having received this award in 2017, then went on to undertake ever grander professional challenges including becoming the director of PPPL.”

The recognition is the latest for Fisch, a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and a former Guggenheim fellow. His past honors include the APS Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics in 1992; the DOE Bronze Medal for Outstanding Mentor in 2002; the DOE Ernest O. Lawrence Award in 2004; the APS James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 2005; and the European Physical Society’s Hannes Alfvén Prize in 2015. ☀︎

PPPL physicists Sam Lazerson and Nate Ferraro

PPPL physicists aim to unlock mysteries of fusion with Early Career Research awards

PPPL physicists Nate Ferraro and Sam Lazerson have won 2018 Early Career Research Program awards sponsored by the DOE Office of Science. The two five-year awards will fund PPPL research that could lead to development of the best designs for doughnut-shaped tokamaks and twisty stellarators — the main magnetic-bottles employed worldwide in the effort to produce virtually inexhaustible fusion power on Earth using the reactions that drive the sun and stars.

The two physicists are the first double PPPL winners in the same year since the Office of Science began the current award in 2010, and the sixth and seventh PPPL winners during that period.

Ferraro and Lazerson work on tokamaks and stellarators, respectively. Theoretical physicist Ferraro focuses on ways to suppress instabilities that cause rapid heating of the walls in tokamaks. Results of his work could provide a blueprint for improved future fusion devices. Lazerson, the lead U.S. collaborator on experiments on the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator in Greifswald, Germany, will explore the confinement in stellarators of energetic particles that will be essential to maintaining self-heated fusion reactions. His research could lead to development of steady-state fusion-powered electric plants based on the stellarator design. ☀︎

William Tang

William Tang wins 2018 Global Impact Award from computer chip maker NVIDIA

Physicist William Tang has won a $100,000 Global Impact Award from NVIDIA Corp., the leading producer of graphics processing units (GPUs) for carrying out artificial intelligence (AI) computing. Tang, a principal research physicist at PPPL, is a lecturer with the rank and title of professor in Princeton University’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He leads a team of scientists that is using modern NVIDIA GPU’s to develop a form of AI machine learning called “deep learning” to predict and mitigate the onset of dangerous disruptive events capable of terminating fusion reactions in tokamaks.

“This most welcome and timely recognition brings excellent attention to Princeton’s deep learning research and development to help establish the feasibility of producing fusion energy,” said Tang. “It also highlights the powerful connection between deployment of advanced GPU technology and accelerated understanding of major scientific endeavors such as the quest for fusion energy.”

The team, working through the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) at Princeton University, has sharply increased the speed and accuracy of disruption predictions. The researchers now seek to develop the software for enabling control systems to avoid plasma disruptions in ITER, the international fusion facility under construction in France to demonstrate the achievability of fusion power. ☀︎

Flowmeter developers: Adam Fisher, Daniel Dudt, Michael Hvasta.

Flowmeter developers: Adam Fisher, front left; Daniel Dudt, rear; Michael Hvasta, right

Team wins first place for PPPL-developed device

A team of Princeton University inventors won first place at the 13^th Annual Innovation Forum for its invention of a unique type of device called a “flowmeter.” The instrument was developed at PPPL and offers a simple and inexpensive method of measuring fluids in industrial applications. The inventors received $15,000 to further develop the project.

“We’d like to thank PPPL for offering the infrastructure, opportunity and expertise for this technology,” said lead inventor Michael Hvasta, an associate professional specialist in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, who developed the flowmeter with co-inventors Daniel Dudt and Adam Fisher, graduate students in the department.

Hvasta and co-inventors work on liquid metal research with Egemen Kolemen, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton, jointly appointed by PPPL and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

What makes the flowmeter unique is the use of low-friction bearings that allow the device to respond more quickly and without requiring calibration, making it able to measure liquids at low-flow rates. The inventors plan to use the award to further test and refine the device. ☀︎

Doctoral Thesis and Young Scientist Awards

Seth Davidovits

Seth Davidovits wins 2018 Marshall N. Rosenbluth dissertation award

Seth Davidovits, a 2017 graduate of the Program in Plasma Physics in the Princeton Department of Astrophysical Sciences, has won the 2018 Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award presented by the American Physical Society (APS). The award, named for distinguished plasma physicist Marshall Rosenbluth, whose career included 13 years at PPPL, recognizes “exceptional young scientists who have performed original thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of plasma physics.”

Davidovits’ dissertation focused on the theory and simulation of turbulence in compressing fluids, with an emphasis on effects unique to plasma, such as a novel sudden viscous dissipation mechanism. These investigations led to a variety of insights, and a new model for turbulence in compressing plasma; the dissertation also applied these insights in a variety of application areas, including inertial-confinement-fusion and astrophysical plasmas. His thesis adviser was Professor Nat Fisch, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at and Director of the Program in Plasma Physics, which is based at PPPL.

“The way we originally got onto this topic was through experiments by Professor Yitzhak Maron at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel,” said Davidovits, “The results were pretty unexpected and led us to look for new ways to exploit or prevent turbulence in compressed plasma.”

Davidovits, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Princeton Department of Astrophysical Sciences, holds a DOE Fusion Energy Sciences postdoctoral fellowship. He earned a bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Columbia University in 2010, graduating as valedictorian of Columbia Engineering. As a graduate student at Princeton, he held a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. ☀︎

Caoxiang Zhu

Caoxiang Zhu wins a 2018 CAI Shidong Award for plasma physics in China

Caoxiang Zhu, a postdoctoral researcher at PPPL, has won a 2018 CAI Shidong Award for plasma physics. The award, named for CAI Shidong, a pioneering Chinese plasma physicist and fusion researcher, goes to top graduate students and young scientists in China.

Zhu’s research describes a computer code that he developed with PPPL physicists that takes a novel approach to designing the complex magnetic coils that confine plasma in stellarators, fusion devices that aim to produce energy using the process that powers the sun and the stars. “This really means a lot to me,” Zhu said of the award. “We can design the optimal shape of the coils that has more effective control of the plasma, that’s our idea.”

David Gates, the head of Stellarators at PPPL and one of Zhu’s supervisors, noted that “Caoxiang performed much of his thesis work here at PPPL, working with Stuart Hudson, deputy head of Theory and Computation, and we realized very soon that his work was very special. We are thrilled that he has accepted our offer to continue his stellarator optimization work here at PPPL.” ☀︎

Technology Transfer Recognition

Displaying their award are PPPL physicist Sam Cohen; Stephanie Thomas, vice president of Princeton Satellite Systems, and Michael Paluszek, president of Princeton Satellite Systems. Standing next to them is Valeria Larkin, chair of the FLC Northeast Region.

Displaying their award are from left: PPPL physicist Sam Cohen; Stephanie Thomas, vice president of Princeton Satellite Systems, and Michael Paluszek, president of Princeton Satellite Systems. Standing next to them is Valeria Larkin, chair of the FLC Northeast Region

PPPL’s Sam Cohen and local company receive technology transfer award

Physicist Sam Cohen of PPPL and local company Princeton Satellite Systems have been honored with an award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer for their efforts to develop a rocket propulsion technology. Princeton Satellite has licensed the technology that Cohen is creating.

The award, presented at a meeting of the Northeast Regional Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) at PPPL, recognized Cohen and the company for their work on the Princeton Field Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor for space rocket propulsion. The device, once developed, could sharply reduce the time needed for journeys to Mars and more remote planets when compared with chemical or nuclear-fission propulsion systems.

“Princeton Satellite Systems is a great partner for technology transfer,” said Laurie Bagley, head of Technology Transfer at PPPL. “They possess strong engineering and management skills, are knowledgeable in spacecraft technology, and are out there looking for funding that benefits the Lab and the PFRC technology. It’s clean green fusion energy that may someday enable deep space travel.”

Caption: Displaying their award are from left: PPPL physicist Sam Cohen; Stephanie Thomas, vice president of Princeton Satellite Systems, and Michael Paluszek, president of Princeton Satellite Systems. Standing next to them is Valeria Larkin, chair of the FLC Northeast Region. ☀︎

Environmental Stewardship

PPPL wins national awards for environmental practices

The Laboratory received four national awards in 2018 for past environmental activities. The honors:

A GreenBuy Prime Award for fiscal year 2017 presented by the DOE’s Office of Environmental, Health, Safety & Security at the 2018 Energy Exchange Conference. The honor recognizes PPPL for receiving three gold GreenBuy awards for its green purchasing in the last several years. The DOE raises the bar each year to encourage facilities to increase their green purchasing. “It’s nice for the DOE to recognize that we’ve put these programs in place and to recognize that PPPL has really embraced sustainability and connected it to our business processes,” said Robert Sheneman, head of PPPL’s Environmental Services Division.
A three-star EPEAT award from the Green Electronics Council recognizing that 99 percent of PPPL’s electronics purchased in fiscal year 2017 were EPEAT-certified, meaning the products use sustainable and recyclable materials that meet or exceed Energy Star specifications for saving energy.
A U.S. EPA 2017 Federal Green Challenge Award and a U.S. EPA 2017 WasteWise Regional Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for PPPL’s 97 percent recycling rate and for its composting program.

The Laboratory also buys bio-based fuels for vehicles and sustainable furniture, along with recycled paper products for the restrooms, recycled paper for copy machines, and other supplies. In addition, PPPL requires Brock & Co., Inc., the cafeteria vendor, to buy green products, with 93 percent of the company’s purchases. ☀︎

Kate Morrison, deputy head of Facilities and Site Services, accepts the GreenBuy Prime Award from Josh Silverman, director of the Office of Environmental Protection and Environment, Safety & Health Reporting at the DOE

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