I am honored to share that I have been named a co-recipient of the 2026 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics, alongside Max Austin (University of Texas at Austin), Al Hyatt (General Atomics), Alessandro Marinoni (UC San Diego) and Carlos Paz-Soldan (Columbia University). The award recognizes a particular recent outstanding achievement in plasma physics research, and was given to our team “for advancing the negative triangularity tokamak concept” through dedicated high-beta experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, bringing it toward readiness for a fusion pilot plant.

DIII-D NT Team Part of the 2023 DIII-D Negative Triangularity Team.

Most tokamak development to date has focused on positive triangularity plasmas, which offer high confinement but come with unresolved challenges in handling the intense heat exhaust of a power plant. Negative triangularity (NT) flips the shape of the plasma into a “reverse-D,” trading a small amount of confinement for a natural immunity to edge localized modes (ELMs) and a much easier path to managing heat exhaust. Following promising initial experiments at DIII-D (building on earlier work at the TCV tokamak in Switzerland), our team carried out a dedicated NT campaign starting in 2022, installing new armor tiles in the DIII-D vessel to allow strongly-shaped, high-power NT operation. Over weeks of operation, the campaign produced high-performance plasmas without a single ELM, achieved the first detached divertor conditions in an NT tokamak, and demonstrated high core performance alongside mitigated divertor heat flux at the same time.

My own contributions focused on two areas. First, I helped develop the plasma control approach that allowed DIII-D to operate reliably in strongly-shaped NT configurations, which are vertically unstable and required new control solutions (see Vertical Control of DIII-D Discharges with Strong Negative Triangularity). Second, I led the analysis that confirmed the physical mechanism behind ELM inhibition in NT plasmas, tying the ELM-free nature of the NT edge to the destabilization of infinite-n ballooning modes that prevent the edge gradients from growing large enough to trigger ELMs (see Robust Avoidance of Edge-Localized Modes alongside Gradient Formation in the Negative Triangularity Tokamak Edge). You can read more about this work in my earlier post on exploring negative triangularity configurations on DIII-D.

This recognition belongs to a much larger group of scientists, engineers and operators at DIII-D and across the 15+ institutions that contributed to the NT campaign, and I am grateful to have been a part of it. The work is far from over: DIII-D is now planning to install an NT-optimized divertor through a public-private partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering, and I am excited to keep helping move negative triangularity toward a fusion pilot plant.

More information on the award can be found in the following announcements: