Deb Shafran (Executive Assistant) 617-253-2029
Anne E. White is the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering and associate vice president for research administration at MIT. Her research focuses on magnetic fusion energy and has contributed to the understanding of turbulent transport in magnetically confined fusion plasmas via diagnostic development, novel experimentation, and validation of nonlinear gyrokinetic codes. Her group’s research is dedicated to the demonstration of nuclear fusion as an important and practical part of the world’s emerging sustainable energy future.
White received her PhD in physics at UCLA and performed research at the Electric Tokamak at UCLA, the National Spherical Torus Experiment at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics before joining MIT as a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). White’s research has contributed to diagnostic development, turbulence and transport physics, and transport model validation on four tokamaks: Alcator C-Mod, ASDEX Upgrade, DIII-D, and National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade. At MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), White served as assistant division head for magnetic fusion energy collaborations and ran the Gyrokinetic Simulation Working Group and the Alcator C-Mod Transport Group. As associate director for education and outreach at PSFC, she also oversaw the center’s educational and K–12 outreach activities. She served as NSE department head from 2019 to 2023 and co-chaired the MIT Climate Nucleus from 2021 to 2024.
She currently chairs the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC), the federal advisory board to the director of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and helped write “Transformative Enabling Capabilities for Efficient Advance Toward Fusion Energy” (2018) and “Powering the Future: Fusion and Plasmas” (2021), two of several FESAC reports that defined the role of fusion as a transformative technology and laid out strategic actions and recommendations for the future of the U.S. fusion program.
In 2018, White led a team in NSE to develop a free MITx MOOC for global high school-level learners focused on nuclear science and engineering, and in 2022, White was one of a select group invited to speak at the White House summit, “Developing a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy.” White was featured in WIRED’s “5 Levels” video series in 2023, explaining nuclear fusion to a popular audience.
She is a member of AAAS, the American Nuclear Society, and the American Physical Society (APS) and a fellow of the APS’s Division of Plasma Physics.
Small fluctuations in tokamak plasmas lead to turbulence, and turbulent eddies can very effectively transport heat from the hot core across confining magnetic field lines out to the cooler plasma edge. Predicting this phenomenon of turbulent-transport is essential for the development of fusion reactors. In order to improve predictive capability by testing and validating models of turbulent-transport, detailed measurements of fluctuations in high-performance, reactor relevant tokamak plasmas are required. Diagnostic techniques that allow for simultaneous measurements of fluctuations in plasma density, temperature, and flows in the core and edge of tokamaks and stellarators are presently being developed. In our group, we develop and use radiometers (electron cyclotron emission systems) for temperature fluctuations in tokamaks, reflectometers and interferometers for density fluctuations, as well as coupled radiometer/reflectometer instruments that allow for simultaneous measurement of temperature and density turbulence. With these new measurement capabilities we will improve our understanding of how turbulence is suppressed and how the turbulent-transport of particles, energy and momentum can be separated from one another. The new data from these measurements allow for stringent tests of turbulent-transport models. Presently, we are interested in determining what kinds of turbulent modes are dominant in different regions of operating space; specifically comparing small scale electron turbulence with larger scale ion turbulence, as part of ‘multi-channel transel validation efforts’. Close collaboration between experiment, theory and simulation is a key aspect of this work.
22.67 Principles of Plasma Diagnostics
22.012 Seminar in Fusion & Plasma Physics
22.071j/6.071j Electronics, Signals, & Measurement
6.651/8.613/22.611 Intro to Plasma Physics I
8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves (Recitations)