Prize Recipient

William Walter Heidbrink
University of California, Irvine

"For the theoretical Discovery and Experimental Identification of Toroidicity Induced Alfven Eigenmodes."

Professor William (Bill) Heidbrink earned his B.A. degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1977. For the next two years he performed industrial research in pulsed power at Maxwell Laboratories. In 1984, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. After working as a staff member on the TFTR tokamak (Princeton) and the DIII-D tokamak (General Atomics), he joined the UC Irvine Physics Department in 1988. He was the 1995 recipient of the Lauds & Laurels award for Distinguished Teaching and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1996.

Professor Heidbrink studies energetic ions in magnetic fusion experiments. Instabilities that are driven unstable by the free energy in the fast-ion population are a major area of study. Other important topics include diagnostic development and measurements of fast-ion confinement. The work is conducted on four facilities, the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego, the National Spherical Torus Experiment in Princeton, the Large Plasma Device at UCLA, and a small field reversed configuration (FRC) at Irvine.

Ronald R Parker (Chair), Alex Friedman (12/04), Siegfried Glenzer (03 Rcpnt)(12/04), Wendell Horton (vice chair) (12/05), Karl Krushelnick