Graduate Students

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 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.

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.

Patrick earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2020. He began working at HSX in 2021 before beginning his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering, which he completed in 2024. He worked on the analysis of mechanical loading of the support structure of HSX as well as on the design of a new gas puff imaging diagnostic to look for edge turbulence in HSX.

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.

Michael joined the HSX team in the summer of 2023 as a graduate student. He received his bachelor’s degree in applied engineering physics at Cornell University, where he learned about and studied every branch of physics and math he could find, gravitating towards energy research and plasma physics. He now pursues that interest by working on diagnostic development on HSX, specifically surrounding the existing reflectometry diagnostic. In the near future, he hopes to introduce Doppler Backscattering Reflectometry to the device, giving an additional avenue of fluctuation and flow analysis to HSX.

Jacob joined the HSX lab as a graduate student in 2024. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Physics at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. He previously interned at the W7-X in Greifswald, Germany for the summer of 2023, where he analyzed Gas Puff Imaging (GPI) data using computer vision machine learning techniques. Now he is working with Thea Energy for the summer of 2024 to run simulations for a Fusion Power Plant (FPP) reactor study.

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.