Declared in 2015 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, International Day of Women and Girls in Science (IDWGS), celebrated every year on the 11th of February, highlights the contributions of women and girl scientists and promotes gender equality across all scientific fields.
In honor of IDWGS we have selected four outstanding women fusioneers from across the world, each of whom work to push the boundaries of fusion research and bring us closer to viable fusion energy.
Dr. Sibylle Günter is the coordinator of the EUROfusion consortium and scientific director of the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics. She specializes in numerical modeling of MHD phenomena in fusion devices, helping to ensure that future reactors will operate efficiently. In one of her recent papers, she and colleagues simulate instabilities observed in the W7-X stellarator if strong current is applied on the device’s magnetic axis. Enjoy her take on science in the context of diplomacy in this recorded panel discussion from the Falling Walls Science Summit that took place in November of 2021.
Dr. Tammy Ma contributed to current, world-first, breakthrough research published in Nature this year titled, “Burning plasma achieved in inertial fusion”. Leading up to the latest achievement of burning plasma, in 2020 Dr. Ma gave a TEDx Talk about progress at the LLNL National Ignition Facility towards sustainable fusion burn. In a 2014 interview, Dr. Ma stated, “We’re pushing new envelopes, so if something goes wrong we’re not blaming each other; it’s just physics, it’s nature and that’s what we’re trying to figure out. The only way you can do it is to work together. It’s a huge team effort.” In 2016 Tammy Ma received the APS Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research in part for quantifying hydrodynamic instability mix in inertial confinement fusion implosions. You can nominate candidates until 1 April 2022 for this year’s edition of the award.
Dr. Min Liao serves as the Section Leader for magnets at the ITER Organization and was previously the youngest female division head at the Southwestern Institute of Physics in China. Her team works on ITER’s superconducting magnet system, which when completed will be the largest in the world. Magnets are critical to the shaping and control of the plasma inside a tokamak. Dr. Liao and colleagues broke down the current and future landscape of superconducting technology applied to fusion in this paper. In addition to her technical work at ITER, Dr. Liao is an advocate for gender equity in fusion. She spoke about some of her strategies for promoting inclusivity at the 2020 IAEA Fusion Energy Conference. Check out the recorded panel here.
Dr. Katherine Weimer was a prolific scientist in the theory group at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the first woman researcher in the lab’s history. Her research focused on MHD equilibrium configurations, which helped inform the design of future axisymmetric fusion devices like tokamaks and stellarators. Check out her paper titled Tokamak Equilibrium, where she and colleagues studied equilibria in the context of a novel heating scheme known as adiabatic compression. The American Physical Society presents her namesake award every two years to an early-career woman physicist for “outstanding achievement in plasma science research”. You can nominate a candidate here for this year’s edition.
Finally, we highlight Women leaders at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who shared their journeys in a recorded panel discussion on International Women’s Day 2021. Panelists included Meera Venkatesh, Gabriele Voigt, Najat Mokhtar, and Elena Buglova, all barrier-breaking women in leadership positions at the IAEA. The recording of the panel discussion can be found here. If you’re having trouble viewing, try clicking in the “Meeting 74 min” box on the right side of the page, or loading in a different web browser.
To the women and girls who push fusion and broader science forward, thank you for the inspiring work you do. From all of us here at the Fusion Group, we wish everyone a very happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science!