Scientists & Staff

David Anderson is the Jim and Anne Sorden Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Principal Investigator for the HSX Program. He has been associated with HSX since its initial design activities in 1990, and teaches in the areas of electrodynamics and plasma physics.

Benedikt Geiger started his career at UW-Madison in February 2019 and is involved in the physics exploitation of the HSX stellarator experiment. His research interests are the experimental investigation of turbulent particle and heat transport with the aim to develop new turbulence-optimized stellarator experiments. He teaches in the field of nuclear engineering and plasma physics.

Santhosh received his PhD in Physics from the Australian National University in 2008. After receiving his PhD, he came to UW-Madison as a Research Associate in the Department of Physics. Since joining HSX in 2012, Santhosh has been involved with researching experimental plasma physics, flows and electric fields, neoclassical modeling of stellarators, impurity transport, plasma spectroscopy, and diagnostic development.

Aaron received his PhD from MIT in 2011.  Since joining HSX in 2012, Aaron has been involved in computational research of interest to stellarators. His topics of interest include, edge plasma physics, coil design, energetic particle confinement and stellarator optimization.

Syed joined HSX in the spring of 2020. He is an electrical engineer with several years of experience in developing industrial control systems for applications ranging from food processing to printing. Syed is primarily working on motor-generator upgrade and associated control system for magnetic confinement of plasma at HSX.

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.

Ben Knowles received his MS in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2001 and worked for the next 17 years as Calibration & Archiving Engineer on the Imaging Operations team for the Cassini Mission during its tour of Saturn.  He spent the next couple of years working in private industry as a Software and Controls Engineer, focusing on automation and scientific instrumentation. He moved to the HSX team in August of 2021, where he develops and maintains the HSX computer and data acquisition network.

Rex comes to HSX with 20+ years of engineering experience in aerospace, automotive, and nuclear industries.