It takes a village to raise a fusion engineer.

Ph.D. students

Students for whom I serve as primary research advisor (Columbia University).

Student-led research

My students have first-authored papers on plasma control, electromagnetic system design, coil optimization, and fusion power plant design:

• S. Guizzo et al., vertical stability of negative triangularity pilot plants [PPCF 2024] and electromagnetic system design [FED 2025]
• J. Salm et al., poloidal field coil optimization for the MANTA tokamak using TokaMaker [AIP Advances 2026]
• H. S. Wilson et al., characterizing the negative triangularity reactor core operating space with integrated modeling [PPCF 2024]
• Student design teams: MANTA [PPCF 2024] and CENTAUR [PPCF 2026] pilot plant concepts

My students have given invited talks at major conferences, and at the 2023 APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting in Denver, two of the five undergraduate poster awards went to students I mentored.

Mentoring: from structure to independence

The principle that guides my teaching also guides my mentoring: provide structure first, then deliberately transfer ownership. New students need clear expectations and concrete examples. As they progress, I hand over responsibility so they learn to generate and defend their own research ideas.

Each student needs a different path to independence. With one graduate student, I started with the hands-off approach I had thrived under myself, but it soon became clear that she needed more structure. We doubled our meeting frequency and I encouraged more communication with collaborators across the field. Within a year she had first-authored her first paper and given an invited talk at a major APS conference. That experience is why I now regularly ask my students for feedback on my mentoring and adjust accordingly.

In practice, this means individual development plans revisited each semester, structured onboarding with shared code and documentation, paired projects for new students, and paid undergraduate research positions.

Undergraduate, master's, and high school researchers

• 2025John Lhota (M.S.) Open FUSION Toolkit tokamak analysis workflows
• 2025Jérémy Salm (M.S.) Optimization of coil locations for fusion power plants
• 2025Amelia Stevens (M.S.) A stellarator POPCON code
• 2025Jenna Cai Database of ELM-free scenarios on international machines
• 2025Matthew Wang A stellarator POPCON code
• 2025Maddox Mayo Automated deployment of physics workflows on DIII-D
• 2024Kate Krogen Edge profile variation using CAKE — now a graduate student at William & Mary
• 2024Thomas Wang Physics modules for the CFSPOPCON code
• 2024Aaroosh Ramadorai Physics modules for the CFSPOPCON code
• 2023Jake Halpern (Columbia graduate student) MHD stability in negative triangularity on DIII-D
• 2023Sophia Guizzo Vertical stability for negative triangularity power plants — now a graduate student at Columbia
• 2023Vikram Ailiani Magnetic equilibrium reconstruction techniques
• 2023Alexa Lachmann Pythonic conversion of the FEEQS code for the Open FUSION Toolkit — now a graduate student at Columbia
• 2023Sam Benson (high school) Plasma radiation processes
• 2022Lucia Rondini Bounce-orbit trajectories in negative triangularity — now a graduate student at Columbia
• 2022Daniel Burgess Inherently non-ELMing tokamak scenarios — now a graduate student at Columbia
• 2021Samuel Freiberger Negative triangularity shaping on MAST-U — now a graduate student at Columbia
• 2021Samantha O'Sullivan Neutral beam blips and ELM triggers — now a graduate student at Oxford
• 2021Javier Morales-Arias Lithium exposures to plasma discharges — now a graduate student at Princeton

Prospective students

I am always happy to hear from students interested in fusion engineering, power plant design, or data-driven methods for engineering systems. No prior plasma physics background is needed. Send me a short note about what excites you and a CV at a.o.nelson@columbia.edu.