IPP scientist elected Fellow of the American Physical Society

Thomas Sunn Pedersen nominated for Fellowship in the APS

In recognition of his outstanding contributions in physics IPP scientist Professor Dr. Thomas Sunn Pedersen has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

In recognition of his outstanding contributions in physics IPP scientist Professor Dr. Thomas Sunn Pedersen has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). With this distinction his colleagues in the Plasma Physics Section of APS are honouring in particular “his seminal studies of pure electron plasmas in a stellarator”, states the Fellowship Certificate, and for “active stabilisation of resistive wall modes”, a special kind of plasma instabilities in a tokamak.

The objective of the American Physical Society is to extend physical knowledge, support physicists world-wide, and promote international cooperation. The venerable society, domiciled at College Park in Maryland, USA, was established in 1899 and has a present membership of 40,000. No more than half a per cent of the members may be elected Fellow.

Thomas Sunn Pedersen studied applied physics and engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby and took his PhD in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. He then built at Columbia University in New York an ingeniously simple magnetic field configuration of the stellarator type, the Columbia Non-neutral Torus, with which he, for example, investigated pure electron plasmas. In 2010 he was appointed Scientific Fellow of the Max Planck Society and since 2011 has been head of the Stellarator Edge and Divertor Physics Division of Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics at Greifswald. In 2012 he was appointed Professor at the Institute of Physics, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald.