Prize Recipient

Tammy Ma
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

"For innovation and leadership in quantifying hydrodynamic instability mix in inertial confinement fusion implosions at the National Ignition Facility and for key contributions to experiments demonstrating fusion fuel gains exceeding unity."

Tammy Ma, Ph.D., is an experimental physicist in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and high energy density physics at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Berkeley, California. Dr. Ma graduated from the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena) in 2005 with a B.S. in aerospace engineering, before getting her M.S. in 2008 and her Ph.D. in 2010, both from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Ma subsequently completed her postdoctoral fellowship at LLNL before becoming a staff scientist in 2012, leading a number of the NIF’s experiments and heading the X-ray Analysis Group for the ICF program. She has authored or co-authored over 110 refereed journal publications, and is strongly committed to education and scientific outreach. Dr. Ma is a recent recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering.

2016 Selection Committee Members: Bill Kruer (Chair), Melissa Douglass (Vice Chair), Nuno Loureiro (Award recipient), Greg Hammett, Alec Thomas