Education

I graduated with special and highest honors in physics from the University of Texas in the spring of 1988. That fall, enrolled in two graduate programs at Princeton University -- the Master's in Public affairs program and the plasma physics PhD program, in the astrophysical sciences department. For my MPA work, I focused on international science policy, learning a great deal from Frank von Hippel. I spent a summer at the Department of State, where I focused on international civilian nuclear reactor issues (think Chernobyl) and the international fusion program (it was the early days of ITER). 

Greg Hammett was my PhD advisor. Greg simultaneously advised Mike Beer, Steve Smith, and Phil Snyder. It was an exciting group to be a part of.

Postdoc

Upon receiving my MPA and PhD degrees in 1993, I married Sarah Penniston and moved back to Austin, TX, to work at the Institute of Fusion Studies, funded by a DOE Fusion Postdoctoral Fellowship. In Austin, I worked most closely with Mike Kotschenreuther. Together, Mike Kotschenreuther, Mike Beer, Greg Hammett, and I demonstrated for the first time the key role the ion temperature gradient-driven instability plays in limiting tokamak performance. The next few years were contentious ones, as the implications of those findings percolated through the fusion program. 

Research Scientist

In 1997, our daughter Kendall was born. In 1998, we packed up and moved to Maryland so that Sarah could pursue her PhD in geology at Johns Hopkins with her newly minted NSF graduate fellowship. I took up a research position at UMD, where I began working closely with Barrett Rogers. In 2000, I received a special award from CIEE, citing "creative ideas in international education". This referred to work I did as an undergraduate with Keith Duff and Crisney Lane at UT, to get funding for undergraduate study abroad programs established. Long story short: we had to get the Texas Legislature to pass a new law for that, which then applied across the state, and which was then copied by other states. 

Junior faculty member

In early September, 2001, we moved to London so that I could join Steve Cowley's growing group at Imperial College as a "Reader" (aka associate professor) in the physics department. Our London flat cost a good deal more than our house in Baltimore, unfortunately, and we returned to the US one year later, where I took up an assistant professorship at UMD, with a three-way appointment in a research unit (now called the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics), in the Department of Physics, and in the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling. I did not find working in three different units to be an advantage. 

Chordoma

In 2004, I was diagnosed with a rare and typically lethal cancer of the spine. Then 38 years old, I had about a 50/50 chance of making it to 41. I'm obviously beating the odds! I underwent multiple major surgeries and radiation treatments in the first few years. By 2009, I had exhausted conventional treatments, so I began enrolling in experimental Phase I trials, some of which were influenced by the foundation we patients had set up in the meantime. There is a nice article from 2014 that covers these milestones. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had another recurrence. I was in and out of the hospital (mainly participating in experimental trials) throughout the pandemic. In one of those trials, the medical team spliced a variant of smallpox together with brachyury, a protein that is implicated in chordoma growth, and injected it directly into my bloodstream. I was one of the first twelve humans to have any anti-cancer vaccine administered by IV. My physical response was brief but memorably unpleasant. In May, 2021, I got good news. The tumors that had been growing were shrinking. In 2022, they began to grow again, despite my participation in further trials at NIH. As the tumors slowly spread downward toward my right femur, my hip broke in an unfixable way in 2022, ultimately leaving me confined to a wheelchair. In late 2022, I had my genome sequenced in an effort to find new treatment options. In 2023, I am trying several such options simultaneously. Twenty years since diagnosis, I like to say that I'm fortunate I wasn't trying to get through life as an athlete, because spinal cord damage has left me with extensive paralysis and limited mobility. In late 2023, the going got rough. After Thanksgiving, I ended up in the emergency room with multiple serious problems -- sepsis, associated with a stage 4 pressure sore, renal failure, heart failure, covid, anasarca, GI tract failure, and more. I ended up going back with a similar list of problems twice in the following weeks. In total, I was in the hospital for about two months. Shortly after that, I was diagnosed with a Deep Vein Thrombosis. That was super-lucky, as the diagnosis came from a blood test associated with a voluntary covid study I was in. Had I not done the covid study, the DVT likely would have done me in, as it was pretty serious. In late May, 2024, I will have the pressure sore debrided, followed by the construction of a flap made out of my left hamstring. The recovery will be much harder than the two minor surgeries. I expect to be unable to sit for 6-8 weeks. That will be difficult because of my broken hip -- I haven't been able to lie down comfortably for a couple of months. Around August, I will be done with the pressure sore and able to restart chordoma treatment, which has been on hold since Thanksgiving. It is important to get this done soon because in the absence of any treatments, the tumors in my hip, groin, and lungs are growing unchecked. They are growing slowly, at least! 

Senior faculty member; recognition

In 2005, I was promoted to Associate Professor at UMD, and made a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2008, I was named a Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellow. In 2009, I was awarded the EO Lawrence medal, which at that time came with a $50,000 cash prize. After taxes, there was just enough to cover a celebratory dinner with family and friends and to repay a large loan we had taken out to pay for medical treatments. In 2010, I was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. Since 2010, I have held a Visiting Professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, working particularly closely and productively with Alex Schekochihin. 

Graduate students

I have had excellent graduate students at Imperial and UMD. At Imperial, David Applegate and Nathan Joiner worked on microtearing and ETG physics respectively. Nathan extended his focus to include microtearing and joined Akira Hirose in Saskatchewan after completing his PhD. At UMD, Andy Tillotson studied laboratory versions of the magnetorotational instability. Andy is now an Assoc Lecturer of Physics on NYU's Abu Dhabi campus. Kate Despain worked with GPU hardware and gyrofluid software, examining nonlinear phase mixing in the solar wind and in laboratory experiments. Michael Barnes made critical improvements to GS2, and then built the Trinity multiscale transport solver. Michael is now a professor of physics at the University of Oxford. In pursuit of a master's degree, Bryan Osborn wrote a lattice Boltzmann solver for MHD, demonstrating that while it is possible, the methods are generically overly diffusive. Meem Mahmud brought a lot of joy to the group in 2008, but ultimately decided to do something other than physics. I am proud to say that she and Nick (her husband, also a grad student in physics) asked me to officiate for their wedding ceremony, which I was very happy to do! Kyle Gustafson came to Maryland with a Hertz Fellowship. He worked on non-diffusive particle transport in chaotic flows. He went on to take a postdoc in Lausanne, and is now doing science of another kind in Seattle. Ingmar Broemstrup came to UMD from Germany. He developed a solid collision operator for GK PIC applications, demonstrating its favorable properties in his own GK PIC code. Ingmar is now a partner with BCG. George Wilkie joined the group a few years later, intending to extend Ingmar's code in various ways. Unfortunately, he instead discovered a nasty delta-f GK PIC instability (associated with multiple species, part of the generalization he had undertaken). Several years later, a convincing solution for George's instability is finally ready to be published by scientists from Princeton and Los Alamos. Instead of perservering with PIC, George took on turbulent heating in the context of superthermal particle distributions (alpha particle slowing down distributions, for example). George is now a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. After Ingmar and before George came Anjor Kanekar. Anjor produced a kinetic fluctuation-dissipation theorem and the first evidence for phase-unmixing in the solar wind. Anjor worked for a period of time with Palantir, in London, and is now with Protocol Labs (still in London).

Three graduate students defended their thesis work in the course of the pandemic. Jimmy Juno, co-advised by Jason TenBarge and Ammar Hakim, built out the 6-D version of Gkeyll. Jimmy took a postdoc with Greg Howes, a close colleague since we worked together at Imperial, now a physics professor at the University of Iowa. Jimmy is now a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Elizabeth Paul, co-advised by Matt Landreman and Tom Antonsen, brought adjoint methods to bear on a wide range of problems in stellarator optimization. She won the APS Marshall Rosenbluth Prize for her thesis. After a postdoc at Princeton University, Elizabeth is now a professor at Columbia University. Mike Martin studied both neoclassical temperature screening and turbulent transport in stellarators, also with Matt Landreman as his co-advisor. Mike is now with Princeton Stellarators, Inc. Today, I have two graduate students. Rahul Gaur is working on turbulence and microstability in negative triangularity tokamaks, stellarators, and in high beta configurations, among other topics (including machine learning). Nathaniel Barbour is focusing on bringing interpretable ML (specifically reservoir computing) methods to accelerate gyrokinetic turbulence calculations. 

Several graduate students came to Maryland for summer practicum assignments, to work on gyrokinetic problems. The long list includes Emily Belli (now at General Atomics), Tim Stoltzfus-Dueck (now at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory), Jon Hillesheim (now at JET), Jessica Baumgaertel (now at Los Alamos), and Jesse Pino (now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). 

Three undergraduates who worked with me won the University Medal, the highest academic honor bestowed by the University of Maryland. Noah Mandell completed his PhD at Princeton, won the Frederick Howes award for his thesis work, won a DOE Fusion Postdoctoral Fellowship which he pursued at MIT, and is now a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Chris Bambic is currently a graduate student at Princeton University. Michael Nastac is a graduate student at the University of Oxford. Several more very talented undergraduates have worked with our group, including Anna Grafov, Joey Taylor, Arthur Carlton-Jones, Dylan Langone, and Jake Bringewatt, among others. 

Service

I served as the director of the Honors College at the University of Maryland from January, 2009, through December, 2016. While I was there, we doubled the budget, increased the number of undergraduate programs from three to seven, increased faculty teaching in the college from around 50 per year to more than 80, and greatly increased external (non-university) support. One of our students was named a Rhodes Scholar, among other signs of progress. I am presently the head of the honors program for the Department of Physics. I have recently served as an elected faculty Senator at UMD. 

In 2008, I served a six month term as interim director of the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics. I have chaired the APS Committee for the International Freedom of Scientists and the National Research Council's Plasma Science Committee. I have served as a member of: the NSTX program committee, the PPPL advisory board, the APS Panel on Public Affairs, and the National Academy of Sciences Plasma 2010 Decadal Survey Committee. I have chaired scientific program committees and the like. 

Since 2013, I was one of two editors of the Journal of Plasma Physics, published by Cambridge University Press. The other editor is Alex Schekochihin. Under our leadership, the impact factor of the journal has approximately tripled. In 2022, JPP's impact factor was greater than both Physics of Plasmas and Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. Since April of 2020, we have hosted the weekly Frontiers in Plasma Physics Colloquium series. I stepped down from this editorial position in mid-2023. 

At the end of July, 2023, I completed a three-year rotation to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where I served as the Associate Laboratory Director for Computational Sciences. This was a half-time appointment. During that time, I continued to hold a half-time professorship in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. 

Current Appointments

Now back at the University of Maryland, I am jointly appointed in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics. I consult for Type One Energy, participate in two SciDAC projects (led from PPPL and General Atomics) and one ML project (led from UCLA), and provide advice and support to PPPL on matters related to computational science and engineering. I am also the head of the physics department's undergraduate honors program.