Benedikt Zimmermann

Benedikt is a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Paz-Soldan’s group, working full-time at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, California. His current research focuses on studying ELM-free regimes and benign disruption termination strategies for reactor-relevant applications.

Before this, he studied in Leipzig, Saint Petersburg, and Munich, earning his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich in 2024. His doctoral research was conducted on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, under the supervision of Rachael McDermott and Clemente Angioni. This work centered on the experimental validation of gyrokinetic theory related to the turbulent transport of momentum and later included experiments on the TCV and DIII-D tokamaks.

Outside of his academic work, Benedikt enjoys hiking, running, cooking, and exploring medieval literature and its reception in 19th-century art and opera.