Karoline Wiesner is Professor of Complexity Science at the Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Potsdam University, and author of the book What is a Complex System?, published with Yale University Press. The book is most recently discussed on the podcast ’Simplifying Complexity’.
Cary Forest is professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and director of the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory. He is also co-founder, CSO and acting CTO of Realta Fusion Incorporation.
Tammy Ma is the Lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Institutional Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the U.S. She was a member of the team achieving burning plasma, followed by fusion ignition in December 2022 at the National Ignition Facility, demonstrating more energy gain from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) and currently sits on the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). She also chaired the 2022 DOE Basic Research Needs Workshop and Report in Inertial Fusion Energy and served on the German Expert Panel that authored the Memorandum on Laser Inertial Fusion Energy.
Tilmann Lunt is a research scientist in the Plasma Edge and Wall Department (E2M) at IPP Garching. His scientific interests include alternative divertor configurations and the physics of the plasma edge, in particular the effects of 3D magnetic field perturbations. He is also responsible for the visual and near-infrared camera systems of the ASDEX Upgrade experiment.
Stefano Atzeni was Professor of Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and after his retirement has joined Focused Energy GmbH in Darmstadt, Germany, as Consulting Senior Scientist.
Hans-Walter Rix is director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and professor at the University of Heidelberg faculty for physics and astronomy. In his thesis work with Simon White he figured out that most large elliptical galaxies also have sizable stellar disks, and hence must have a different formation history than thought at the time. He also had the opportunity to work with Craig Hogan on gravitational lensing, with Marcia and George Rieke on infrared imaging and spectroscopy, and with Rob Kennicutt. He then went on to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, working on some of the very first Hubble Space Telescope data on gravitational lensing and giving in to the numerous, exciting scientific diversions that Princeton has to offer. After a year at MPA, Garching and three years on the faculty at the University of Arizona, he came to MPIA late 1998. In the first five years, his focus was on galaxy evolution, helping to draw up a comprehensive picture of what the population of galaxies looked like when the Universe was half its age. In recent years he has focused his research on our very own galaxy, the Milky Way, because the intricate detail in which it can be studied, should lead us to a better understanding of galaxy formation as a whole. As of 2016, the Gaia space mission along with other vast spectroscopic surveys of stars, and then Hubble's successor James Webb Space Telescope are the next beacons on his science path.
Karl Lackner is Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics. For biographical details see https://www.ipp.mpg.de/1084867/lackner
Ambrogio Fasoli is Programme Manager (CEO) of the European Consortium for Fusion Energy, EUROfusion, Director of the Swiss Plasma Centre at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Delegate to the Provost of the EPFL. Ambrogio Fasoli, an honorary member of the American Physical Society, studied at the University of Milan and obtained his doctorate at the EPFL. After conducting experiments on the European JET tokamak in the United Kingdom, he became a professor at MIT in the United States, where he worked from 1997 to 2001, before being appointed professor at EPFL. From 2014 to 2020, he was editor-in-chief of the journal Nuclear Fusion of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Idelfonso Tafur Monroy obtained his MSc from Saint Petersburg University of Telecommunications (Russia) in 1992 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in 1999. He also took courses at Stockholm University (Sweden), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Utrecht University. Tafur Monroy worked as Assistant Professor in Electro-Optical Communications at TU/e from 1999 to 2006, after which he became Associate Professor and later Full Professor at DTU Fotonik (Denmark). In the meantime, Tafur Monroy also worked at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications (China), UC Berkeley (USA) and ITMO University (Russia) as visiting professor.
Tafur Monroy founded Bifrost Communications in 2015. In 2017, he returned to TU/e to become Full Professor in the Electrooptical Communication (ECO) group of the electrical engineering department and to join the Institute for Photonic Integration. He is currently the leader of the team Quantum and Terahertz Systems (QTS) within the ECO group.
Clemens Walther is Professor at the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany and Head of the Institute of Radioecology and Radiation Protection. He is president of the German-Swiss Society for Radiation Protection and Head of the Steering Board of the Competence Center Radiation Research (KVSF). Since 2015 he is a member of the German Commission for Radiation Protection. Prof. Walther’s past appointments include being Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (2019–2021), Chair of the Nuclear Chemistry Section of the German Chemical Society (2019-2022), Head of the European Network on Nuclear and Radiochemistry Education and Training (2016–2022), Member of the extended governing board of the German Society for Mass Spectrometry (DGMS) (2012–2015) and Head of the mass spectrometry division of the German Physical Society (DPG) (2012–2015).
Ante Hecimovic received his PhD in Plasma Physics from Sheffield Hallam University (UK) in 2009. After that, he joined Ruhr-University Bochum (under Prof. Jörg Winter) where he established a lab for plasma diagnostics of high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS), a plasma vapour deposition method for production of thin films. The scientific findings have been assembled in a book that he co-authored entitled High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering - Fundamentals, Technologies, Challenges and Applications (Elsevier 2020). In 2017 he was one of the scientists that established the plasma for gas conversion (P4G) group at IPP, and took over the position of group leader of the P4G group. He is interested in using plasma diagnostics to develop an understanding of the dominant dissociation pathways of abundant molecules enabling the formation of value added chemicals. This knowledge is applied to tune the efficiency of molecular splitting using various plasma sources, aiming to contribute to the future chemical energy storage landscape.
Richard Anderson is head of the Stellar Standard Candles and Distances research group at EPFL’s Institute of Physics. He received his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Geneva. Prior to his current position at EPFL, he worked at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, USA from 2014 to 2017, funded by an SNSF Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship. From 2017 to 2020, he was an independent Research Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching b. München, Germany.
Philip Schneider studied physics at the LMU in Munich and became interested in plasma physics already during his studies. Both his diploma thesis and his PhD thesis focused on heat transport studies in ASDEX Upgrade. After receiving his PhD from LMU, he joined IPP as a postdoc and later as a tenured staff scientist. His research work started with heat transport studies in the plasma centre, then moved to the properties of the pedestal and its width in AUG, DIII-D and JET. After a detour to build a neutral particle analyser for fast ions, he finally returned to the plasma centre - without losing sight of the pedestal. Philip supports the AUG team as an experiment leader, diagnostician and radiation protection officer, and since 2018 he has been driving the planning and execution of the JET research task to study the influence of isotopes on transport and confinement during the JET DTE2 and DTE3 tritium campaigns.
Torsten Enßlin is head of the Information Field Theory group at the the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics. His research focuses on the application of IFT to problems in cosmology, such as the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background or the large-scale structure of the cosmic matter distribution. He and his group are also working on galactic cartography, in particular on special-purpose IFT methods to better imagine relativistic particles and magnetic fields, and even to tomographically reconstruct their distribution within the Milky Way.
Jorrit Lion studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the University of York, UK. He obtained his PhD at the IPP Greifswald and contributed with research on modelling of stellarators for fusion power plant applications. In early 2023 he co-founded the IPP spin-out company Proxima Fusion, where he leads the scientific program as Chief Scientist (https://www.proximafusion.com/about).
This colloquium will consist of two shorter presentations. The first speaker is Alex Borovskis. Alex is a global cleantech leader with deep expertise in fusion technologies. As the co-founder of HELIXOS (https://www.helixos.co), he delivers commercialisation, strategic communications, and technical advisory services to global research organisations, governments, technology developers, investors, and end-users. Alex leads all aspects of the organisation’s business development, project execution, and operations. The second speaker is Dr Christian Flüchter. Christian is a consultant and project manager at VDI Technologiezentrum GmbH (https://www.vditz.de). He works for various ministries on projects involving the funding of applied research in technologies such as OLEDs, photovoltaics, photonics, quantum technologies and, for the last three years, nuclear fusion. Christian received his PhD in Experimental Physics from the TU Dortmund in 2008 with a dissertation on h-dielectrics for the semiconductor industry, which was carried out at the DELTA synchrotron laboratory of the TU Dortmund and abroad at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory LNLS in Campinas near Sao Paulo.
Dr. Margaret Crofoot is a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary anthropologist interested in the evolution of social complexity. In her research, she combines observational methods and field-based experiments with emerging remote sensing technology, to reveal how group-living animals overcome conflicts of interest to achieve shared goals. She is particularly interested in how group-level traits emerge and the ways in which they shape the collective ecology of animals’ societies. Meg studied Human Biology at Stanford University (1997-2001) and obtained her Masters (2003) and PhD degrees (2008) in Anthropology from Harvard University. As a Postdoc she worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (2008-2013). She taught as Lecturer in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton University (2009-2011) and then as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (2013-2019) at the University of California, Davis. In recognition of her scientific accomplishments, Meg has been honored with a number of awards including the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2016) and the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2018). In 2019 she became Director of the Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and full Professor at the University of Konstanz (https://www.ab.mpg.de/person/99737).
Michael Kraus is leader of the working group Geometric Numerical Integration and Reduced Complexity Modelling in the department Numerical Methods in Plasma Physics at IPP Garching (https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4106005/gspm). Michael studied physics at the University of Jena and then TU München. For his dissertation at IPP Garching on Variational Integrators in Plasma Physics he received the Otto-Hahn Medal of the MPG. After obtaining his PhD he also gained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship for a two year research stay abroad as Visiting Assistant Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. In 2017 he returned to IPP as tenure staff scientist in department NMPP where he was promoted to working group leader in 2021.
Thomas Hamacher is Professor of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Systems at TU München and is Director at the Munich Institute of Integrated Materials, Energy and Process Engineering (https://www.epe.ed.tum.de/en/ens/homepage/).
A step by step walk into the energy future: The next hundred years will see major changes in the energy system. The emergence of new technologies and the improvement of existing ones, in interaction with regulation, demand and overall political constraints, will shape the new system. For the time being, it is only possible to identify trends that could lead to change in the future, and to identify technological and other challenges for different system developments, without picking winners now. It is very likely that we will see more renewable energy systems being deployed, but advanced fossil fuel and nuclear technologies will be added depending on political and geographical conditions. The talk will present a three-step view of the future, starting with the current trends that will have the greatest impact in the new future, moving to a time when at least policy targets expect net zero emissions, and then to a very distant outlook when an even more holistic set of sustainability criteria is applied. The presentation tries to show that fusion could be a cornerstone in a future system that reduces more and more compromises on sustainability criteria.[mehr]
Friedrich Wagner was born on 16 November 1943 in Pfaffenhofen (Swabia). After studying physics and taking his PhD at the Technical University of Munich in 1972, Wagner then went as a postdoc to Ohio State University, where he did research in the field of low-temperature physics from 1973 to 1974. In 1975 he joined Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, being made head of the ASDEX tokamak experiment in 1986 and appointed Scientific Fellow in 1988. Wagner qualified for lectureship in the same year at the University of Heidelberg, where he held a teaching post till 1991. That year he became Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. From 1989 till 1993 he has been project head of the Wendelstein 7-AS stellarator experiment. From 1993 to 2005 he was member of the Directorate of IPP, from March 1999 till April 2007 Speaker of the Greifswald Branch Institute and from 2003 till 2005 head of the "Wendelstein 7-X Enterprise". In 1987 he was awarded the "Excellency in Plasma Physics" prize by the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society, in 2007 the Hannes Alfvén Prize of the European Physical Society. In 2008 he has been awarded the Stern-Gerlach Medal 2009 by the German Physical Society. Since 1999 he is Ordinary Professor at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald. Besides his institute commitments, Wagner was from 1996 till 2004 Chairman of the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society, from 2007 till 2009 he was President of the European Physical Society. Wagner is Honorary Member of the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Fellow of the Institute of Physics of the American Physical Society, and Member of the Editorial Board at the Institute of Physics. He retired end of 2008.
Dr. Richard Kembleton has been working in fusion physics for over 20 years, starting with a PhD in fusion materials at Cambridge University. He then joined UKAEA (UK Atomic Energy Authority) where he was a member of the Power Plant Technology Group and worked on DEMO, power plant designs, and fusion economics. Dr. Kembleton joined EUROfusion in Garching in 2018 to manage the Prospective R&D programme aimed at realising technology for commercialisation, and then joined Gauss Fusion in 2023 where he now acts as the CSO. --- Dr. Samuel Lazerson has a B.S. in Engineering Physics from Emby-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach Florida, and a Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has worked on stellarator physics for 15 years as a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald. He's conducted research on the Large Helical Device, HSX, CNT, DIII-D, NSTX, ITER, and W7-X. In May of last year Samuel joined Gauss Fusion as the stellarator physics lead.
