Alex has been with Commonwealth Fusion Systems since 2019 after starting as lucky employee number 13. He’s seen the company grow to more than 600 and has been part of the SPARC project as it has evolved from idea to sketch to concrete in the ground.
Fusion Experience Before CFS
Alcator C-Mod (Cambridge, USA)ASDEX Upgrade (Garching, Germany)Large Helical Device (Toki, Japan)During his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), Alex worked primarily on the Alcator C-Mod and ASDEX Upgrade tokamaks. For his thesis work, Alex built fancy thermometers to measure turbulence in tokamak plasmas and then compared measurements to simulated results to validate the simulations. During his PhD, Alex also spent some time at the Large Helical Device (LHD) stellarator in Japan, working on data analysis for another type of fusion measurement.
Fusion Tourist
Wendelstein 7X (Greifswald, Germany)KSTAR (Daejeon, Korea)TCV (Lausanne, Switzerland)MAST Upgrade (Culham, UK)Joint European Torus (Culham, UK)NSTX-Upgrade (Princeton, NJ)In addition to working on several fusion machines around the world, Alex is also an avid fusion tourist, making sure to see every tokamak and stellarator that he can while presenting his work at other labs around the work.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019 Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Plasma Physics
Princeton University, 2014 Batchelor of Science and Engineering in Mechanical Engineering with Highest Honors (Summa Cum Laude) Certificate in Engineering Physics
