Prize Recipient

Ian Emanuel Ochs
Princeton University

"For developing rigorous constraints on charge extraction across magnetic fields and powerful theorems relating lower hybrid current drive to alpha channeling, and for studying unusual transport effects with diverse applications in multi-species magnetized plasmas."

Ian E. Ochs received his A.B. in Physics from Harvard in 2015. As an undergraduate, he researched the mathematics of evolving biological populations, before coming to PPPL through the National Undergraduate Fellowship to study the interactions between waves and fusion ash. He then earned his Ph.D. in 2022 through the Graduate Program in Plasma Physics at Princeton University, where his thesis work was supervised by Nathaniel J. Fisch. His research has largely focused on the relationship between momentum and particle transport during wave-driven and collisional processes. Through theory and simulation, he showed how the same resonant wave-particle interactions could succeed or fail to drive rotation, depending on the wave envelope structure, and demonstrated the equivalence of the alpha channeling and bump-on-tail instabilities. His work led him to study many physical systems, including toroidal and open-field-line fusion plasmas, astrophysical plasmas, and magnetized and unmagnetized Z-pinches, and he has enjoyed fruitful collaborations with researchers at the Weizmann Institute, Holon Institute, University of Paris, and University of Toulouse. While at Princeton, he was the recipient of the Centennial Fellowship, the DOE-CSGF Fellowship, and the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship. Dr. Ochs now works as a DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton, researching aneutronic fusion, centrifugal mirror confinement, and wave-particle interactions in rotating plasmas.