2018 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research

Richard A. Moyer, a Research Scientist at the UC San Diego Center for Energy Research, is one of three people who have been awarded the 2018 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society (APS). The other two awardees are Todd E. Evans of General Atomics and Max E. Fenstermacher of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The citation for their award:

"For the first experimental demonstration of the stabilization of edge localized modes in high-confinement diverted discharges by application of very small edge-resonant magnetic perturbations, leading to the adoption of suppression coils in the ITER design."

Richard A. Moyer is also a senior lecturer of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. His research focuses on understanding and controlling transients in tokamak plasmas that can limit the performance or damage the device, with a goal of developing actuators to suppress or mitigate the consequences of these events

The 2018 John Dawson Award is based in part on research done at DIII-D, a U.S. Department of Energy user facility operated by General Atomics in San Diego. Read more about the award in the General Atomics press release.