The American Physical Society has given its 2026 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research to a team that includes two Columbia Engineering scientists. The team showed that the Negative Triangularity (NT) plasma shape could offer a simpler route to fusion power.
Carlos Paz-Soldan and Oak Nelson share the award with Max E. Austin, Alan W. Hyatt, Alessandro Marinoni, Filippo Scotti and Kathreen E. Thome, who all worked on a set of experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in conjunction with the rest of the DIII-D team. APS honored the group "for advancing the negative triangularity tokamak concept, through dedicated experiments at high beta, toward readiness for a fusion pilot plant."
The award-winning research supports student-led design projects at the Columbia Fusion Research Center that build around NT configurations to design future fusion power plant designs. These include CENTAUR, a proposed device to demonstrate fusion breakeven, and MANTA, a prototype design for a fusion power plant.
Columbia's fusion researchers plan to keep advancing NT research, both at DIII-D and at tokamak facilities around the world.
