Columbia continues to attract the largest number of national fellows interested in plasmas via these programs. Since 2023, including the Department of Energy Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) program, 50% of these national fellows studying plasma have matriculated at Columbia (5 of 11 NSF GRFP awardees and 3 of 4 DOE GSGF awardees). These competitive national fellowships enable awardees to engage in research free from the constraints of traditional grants, and enables the research program to move in new directions that may not yet have traditional funding programs established.
“I am continually impressed by the calibre of students interested in studying plasma physics and fusion energy, and honored that they choose to study at Columbia.” said Carlos Paz-Soldan, the Director of the Columbia Fusion Research Center. “A key measure of a program’s impact is its ability to recruit top talent.”
Eleanor Winkler is an incoming PhD student. She completed her bachelor's degree in physics at MIT and spent her undergraduate years experimenting with various fields to determine what she is most passionate about. Her introduction to fusion research was a summer internship in neutronics for blanket design for a fusion start-up, exploring breeders, moderators, and how to layer them for a D-D stellarator. After this experience, she continued to learn about fusion and plasma physics through her coursework. More recently, she sought to understand how the strength of magnetic fields change the ion fraction of an ion source in order to produce an H2+ beam for IsoDAR, a novel experiment that will probe particle physics beyond the standard model.
Margaret “Meg” Fairborn decided to pursue her doctoral degree in plasma physics at Columbia University on the NSF GRFP fellowship after graduating from Whitworth University with a double major in Physics and Mathematics. She participated in two SULI summer internships at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. During her first summer, she worked with Dr. Adelle Wright to write a GPU-parallelized code that employs a grid-free Monte Carlo method called “walk on spheres” to compute heat transport in stellarators. Her second internship was with Dr. David Smith, exploring the use of quantum computers to obtain improved atomic data for fusion reactions. She is interested in using advanced computational techniques to create tools that will help advance fusion research. Outside of research, Meg likes making homemade ice cream and has made more than 200 flavors.
