Graduate Students

Dionysi Damaskopoulos

Position title: PhD Student

Email: dionysi.damaskopoulos@wisc.edu

Dionysi started joined the HSX Lab and started his Electrical Engineering PhD in Fall 2021. His passion to pursue fusion power pulled him away from the deployment of autonomous vehicles and he is now starting research on neutral density measurements with H alpha detectors. He completed his undergraduate degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering with a minor in physics from Colorado School of Mines. Outside of school and research, he’s often looking for nice hikes or twisty roads to ride his motorcycle through.

Lee Duong

Position title: Graduate Student

Email: lduong@wisc.edu

Lee earned a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. He focused his studies on plasma physics and nuclear power. During his undergraduate, he started working at HSX. Now, he’s a graduate student at HSX under David Anderson, continuing his studies and research.

Michael Gerard

Position title: PhD Student

Email: mjgerard2@wisc.edu

Michael received his Bachelor degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he did research in lunar geology and plasma wakefield acceleration.  He started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2019.  He is pursuing a PhD in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics department under his advisor Benedikt Geiger.  He does computational research in plasma turbulence optimization for HSX.

Wayne Goodman

Position title: PhD Student

Email: wgoodman2@wisc.edu

Celine Lu

Position title: PhD Student

Email: celine.lu@wisc.edu

Celine joined HSX as an undergraduate in 2020. She built a test stand for the diagnostic neutral beam and is now continuing research on it as a graduate student. She hopes to improve the neutralization fraction of the beam and see if changing it from a hydrogen beam to a helium beam will help with other diagnostic measurements.

Dimitri Michaelides

Position title: PhD Student

Email: dmichaelides@wisc.edu

Dimitri joined HSX in the fall of 2017, and is now currently working to find the resonant electric field needed to see a transition into a non-linear viscosity regime in plasma.  Once he finds the field using a biasing electrode, he plans to measure the flows in the regime.

Patrick O'Neill

Position title: Graduate Student

Email: poneill5@wisc.edu

Henrique Oliveira Miller

Position title: PhD Student

Email: oliveiramill@wisc.edu

Henrique joined HSX as a graduate student in 2020. He received Bachelor’s degrees in math and electrical engineering at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he used the PIC code Tech-X VSIM to study a multipole plasma trap. Now he studies turbulence and transport over a range of HSX magnetic topologies. He analyzes experimental confinement in these configurations and runs the gyrokinetic code GENE. He also works on the CHERS diagnostic and a thermocouple-Langmuir probe.

Luquant Singh

Position title: PhD Student

Email: lsingh2@wisc.edu

Luquant Singh is a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department studying magnetic confinement fusion. His research focuses on turbulence measurements in HSX plasmas using a Correlation Electron Cyclotron Emission diagnostic. Luquant joined HSX as an undergraduate in 2017 and investigated improvements to modular coil designs for future stellarators. He received a bachelor’s degree in Applied Math, Engineering and Physics from UW-Madison in 2020 before joining the lab as a graduate student.

Alexander Thornton

Position title: PhD Student

Email: athornton3@wisc.edu

Alex received his BSME from the University of Portland in 2009. He was a systems engineer in the thermal spray industry until 2014 when he joined the Putterman Research Group at UCLA, where he studied plasma physics and helped develop a system which demonstrated acoustically confined, microwave heated plasma. He joined HSX in 2017, where he received his MSEE. He is currently working on a major upgrade to the ECRH system on HSX. His research interests include stellarator transport, RF heating, and wall conditioning systems.