Prize Recipient

Edward J. Strait
General Atomics

Citation:

"For experiments that demonstrated the stabilization of the resistive wall mode and sustained operation of a tokamak above the conventional free boundary stability limit."

Background:

Dr. Edward J. Strait received his B.A. in physics and mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1971.  He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979, with a thesis based on experimental work on the Wisconsin Levitated Octupole.  Dr. Strait joined General Atomics in 1982, where he worked first on the Doublet III tokamak and then its successor, DIII-D.  He developed DIII-Ds magnetic diagnostic system, which is used for feedback control of the discharge, equilibrium reconstruction, and stability analysis.  His research has focused on the MHD stability of tokamak plasmas, including the stability limits of high beta plasmas, instabilities associated with transport barriers, and the stability of toroidicity-induced Alfven eigenmodes.  He is currently working on wall stabilization of high beta plasmas and active control of resistive wall mode instabilities.  Dr. Strait is manager of the ITER Physics research group in the DIII-D Experimental Science Division, and is a fellow of the APS.

Selection Committee:

Nermin Uckan, Chair; Uri Shumlak, Max Tabak, '06 recipient; John Sarff; Janardin Manickam