Benedikt Zimmermann

Benedikt is a scientist 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 disruption mitigation strategies for reactor-relevant applications. In addition, he enjoys supervising students, supports ongoing transport studies across different tokamak devices, and contributes to various industry-related fusion projects.

Before this, he studied in Leipzig, Saint Petersburg, and Munich, and wrote his Bachelor thesis on a project at the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator. His graduate and 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, later included experiments on the TCV and DIII-D tokamaks, and received the PhD Research Award 2025 of the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society.

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