Alvin William Trivelpiece was an American physicist whose varied career included positions as director of the Office of Energy Research of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He was also a professor of physics and a corporate executive. Trivelpiece's research focused on plasma physics, controlled thermonuclear research, and particle accelerators. He received several patents for accelerators and microwave devices. He died in Rancho Santa Margarita, California in August 2022 at the age of 91.
Padma Kant Shukla was a distinguished Professor and first International Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He was also the director of the International Centre for Advanced Studies in Physical Sciences at Ruhr-University Bochum. He held a PhD in physics from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India and a second doctorate in Theoretical Plasma Physics from Umeå University in Sweden.
George H. Miley is a professor emeritus of physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Miley is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was Senior NATO Fellow from 1994 to 1995, received the Edward Teller Medal in 1995, the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Award in Fusion Technology in 2003 and the Radiation Science and Technology Award in 2004. He holds several patents.
Riccardo Betti is the Robert L. McCrory professor of Mechanical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. Since 2004, he has also acted as the Director of the Fusion Science Center at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He received is Ph.D. from the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Prior to that he studied at the University of Rome (Italy), where he graduated with honors with a degree in Nuclear Engineering in 1987.
Ian Horner Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and physicist who is currently Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has made a number of important contributions to the fields of nuclear engineering and nuclear physics and has also written about the philosophy of science and the relationship between religion and science.
John M. "Jack" Carpenter was an American nuclear engineer known as the originator of the technique for utilizing accelerator-induced intense pulses of neutrons for research and developing the first spallation slow neutron source based on a proton synchrotron, the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS). He died on 10 March 2020.
Robert James Goldston is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University and a former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Ronald M. Gilgenbach is the Chair of the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department at the University of Michigan. His career is in the field of Plasma Physics, including some of the earliest tokamak plasma research in the United States. Gilgenbach has been at the University of Michigan since 1980 and has held his Chair position since 2010. He is also the lead faculty of the Plasma, Pulsed Power, and Microwave Laboratory at the University of Michigan.
Robert W. Conn was president and chief executive officer of The Kavli Foundation from 2009 to 2020, a U.S. based foundation dedicated to the advancement of basic science research and public interest in science. A physicist and engineer, Conn was also the board chair of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, an organization that aims to increase private support for basic science research, and dean emeritus of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. In the 1970s and 1980s, Conn participated in some of the earliest studies of fusion energy as a potential source of electricity, and he served on numerous federal panels, committees, and boards advising the government on the subject. In the early 1970s, he co-founded the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), and in the mid-1980s he led the formation of the Institute of Plasma and Fusion Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a university administrator in the 1990s and early 2000s, Conn served as dean of the school of engineering at UC San Diego as it established several engineering institutes and programs, including the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, known as Calit2, the Center for Wireless Communications, and the Whitaker Center for Biomedical Engineering. While at UC San Diego he also led the effort to establish an endowment for the school of engineering, which began with major gifts from Irwin and Joan Jacobs. Irwin M. Jacobs is the co-founder and founding CEO of Qualcomm. While Conn was dean, the engineering school was renamed in 1998 the Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Conn's experience in the private sector includes co-founding in 1986 Plasma & Materials Technologies, Inc. (PMT), and serving as managing director of Enterprise Partners Venture Capital (EPVC) from 2002 to 2008. Over the years he has served on numerous private and public company corporate boards. Conn joined The Kavli Foundation in 2009. He helped establish the Science Philanthropy Alliance in 2012.
Helen Louise Caines is a Professor of Physics at Yale University. She studies the quark–gluon plasma and is the co-spokesperson for the STAR experiment.
John D. Lindl is an American physicist who specializes in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). He is currently the chief scientist of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Marlene Rosenberg is an American plasma physicist known for her work on cosmic and interplanetary dusty plasma.
Arthur Kent Kerman was a Canadian-American nuclear physicist, a fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a professor emeritus of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and Laboratory for Nuclear Science He was known for his work on the theory of the structure of nuclei and on the theory of nuclear reactions.
Ambrogio Fasoli is a researcher and professor working in the field of fusion and plasma physics. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he is Director of the Swiss Plasma Center, located at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 1 January 2019, he chairs the European consortium EUROfusion, the umbrella organisation for the development of nuclear fusion power in Europe.
Tammy Ma is an American plasma physicist who works on inertial confinement fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Sharon Gail Glendinning is an American experimental physicist.
Andrea Lynn "Annie" Kritcher is an American nuclear engineer and physicist who works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She was responsible for the development of Hybrid-E, a capsule that enables inertial confinement fusion. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022.
Senta Victoria (Vicki) Greene is an American experimental high-energy physicist, the Stevenson Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University, where she is also Director of Diversity, Equity, and Engagement for the College of Arts and Science. Her research involves the properties of the quark–gluon plasma, and the shapes of jets in heavy ion collisions.
David A. Hammer is the J. Carlton Ward, Jr. Professor of Nuclear Energy Engineering, in the Cornell University College of Engineering. In 2004, Hammer received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Plasma Science and Applications Committee Award, as well as the Distinguished Career Award from Fusion Power Associates in 2018.
Maria Gatu Johnson is a Swedish-American plasma physicist whose research involves the use of neutron spectrometry to study inertial confinement fusion and stellar nucleosynthesis. She works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a principal research scientist in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
