PSFC - Key Persons
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- Administrative Assistant II
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- Associate Provost and Associate Vice President for Research Administration / School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering
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- Financial Assistant
- Financial Assistant II
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- Director of Strategic Initiatives
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- Senior Research Scientist
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- Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies / Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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- Director, Administration and Finance
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- America Professor of Engineering at MIT
- Director, Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Dennis G. Whyte is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT, a professor in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the Director of the MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center. Whyte's research interests focus on accelerating the development of magnetic fusion energy systems. He has led teams and published over 350 papers across the multi-disciplinary fields of magnetic fusion including plasma confinement, plasma-surface interactions, blanket technology, plasma diagnostics, superconducting magnets and ion beam surface analysis.
Whyte leads the overall MIT research team on SPARC, a private-sector funded compact high-field tokamak presently under development to demonstrate net fusion plasma energy gain. He also leads the Laboratory for Innovations in Fusion Technology at PSFC, which has energy company sponsorship to explore early-stage, disruptive fusion technologies. As an educator, Whyte has been deeply involved in student design courses for fusion energy systems. The core of the SPARC project was formed over eight years ago during a design course led by Whyte to challenge assumptions in fusion. Many of the ideas underpinning the high-field approach - including the use of HTS for high-field, demountable magnets, liquid blankets, and ARC (a fusion power plant concept) - have been conceived of or significantly advanced in his design courses.
Educated in Canada, Whyte earned his B. Eng. from the University of Saskatchewan and a PhD from the Université du Québec working on the Tokamak de Varennes, Canada's national fusion facility. He worked at the DIII-D National Fusion facility for a decade and served as a senior lecturer at University of California, San Diego. He was an assistant professor in the Nuclear Engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2002-2006. Whyte joined MIT in 2006 and served as MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering Department Head from 2015 to 2019.
He has served as leader of the Boundary-Plasma Interface Topical Group of the US Burning Plasma Organization and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics. Among his numerous awards and honors are the Department of Energy's Plasma Physics Junior Faculty Award in 2003, the IAEA Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013, and the Fusion Power Associates Leadership Award in 2018. He is also a two-time winner of the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Engineering at MIT. Whyte has been a committee member on three previous NAS studies: "A Review of the DOE Plan for U.S. Fusion Community Participation in the ITER Program" (2009), "An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy" (2013), and "Bringing Fusion the U.S. Grid" (2021).
Education
Ph.D. Université du Québec, 1993
M.Sc. Université du Québec, 1989
B. Eng. University of Saskatchewan, 1986
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- Associate Director / Senior Research Scientist, Physics Department / Head, Magnetic Fusion Experiments
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- Designer / CAD Operator IV
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- Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering
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- Nuclear Science and Engineering
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- Senior Research Scientist, Physics Department
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- Digital Resources & Reference Librarian
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- Nuclear Science and Engineering
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- Education and Outreach Coordinator
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- Facilities Administrator I
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- Principal Research Scientist / Deputy Division Head, Magnetic Fusion Experiments
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- Administrative Assistant II
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- Administrative Assistant II
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- Senior Research Scientist / Head, High - Energy - Density Physics
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- Professor of Mechanical Engineering / Head, Magnets and Cryogenics
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- Senior Research Scientist
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- Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering / Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
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- Communications Director
- Media Inquiries
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- Administrative Assistant III
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- Human Resources Administrator
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- Administrative Assistant II
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- Program Manager, MITEI / CFS
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- Associate Director, Plasma Science and Fusion Center
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- Deputy Director, Plasma Science and Fusion Center / Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering / Professor of Physics
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- Senior Research Scientist / Head, Plasma Theory and Computation
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- Senior Research Scientist
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- Fusion Education Program Administrator
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- Senior Research Scientist
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- Senior Research Scientist, Physics Department / Head, Plasma Science and Technology
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- Professor of Chemistry / Head, Magnetic Resonance Division
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- Nuclear Science and Engineering
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- Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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- Adminstrative Assistant II
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- Administrative Assistant II
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- Development Professor
- Head, PSFC Engineering Group
Zachary (Zach) Hartwig is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor at MIT and an Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) with a co-appointment at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). He has worked primarily in the areas of large-scale applied superconductivity, magnet fusion device design, and plasma-material interactions with additional activities in nuclear security, radiation detector development, Monte Carlo particle transport simulation, and accelerator science and engineering. His active research focuses primarily on the development of high-field superconducting magnet technologies for fusion energy and accelerated irradiation methods for fusion materials using ion beams. He was the Principal Investigator and Project Head of the SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil Project, a successful 3-year effort from 2018 to 2021 to design, build, and test the first large-scale, high-field, fusion-relevant high temperature superconductor magnet. He is a co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a private company commercializing fusion energy. He oversees the NSE PhD qualification exam process, is a member of the MIT Radiation Protection Committee and Gender Equity Committee, and serves as an MIT First-Year Advisor. He received his PhD from MIT NSE in 2013 for developing a new generation of particle accelerator-based diagnostics to study plasma-material interactions in fusion devices and received his B.A. in Physics from Boston University in 2005.