Director of RF Heating
Hybrid · Foothill Ranch, California, United States
Job Summary
Lead the RF heating research and development program for fusion-energy RF systems, directing strategy and day-to-day activities across experimental RF heating, prototyping, and deployment to support next-generation megawatt-class plasmas. Collaborate with experimental physics, engineering, and computational modeling to ensure RF systems meet performance, reliability, and integration requirements. Define and execute the RF heating roadmap, set priorities, milestones, and success metrics; conduct and supervise experimental work on RF heating systems to improve heating efficiency and inform future design; work with theory/computation to assess compatibility with plasma parameters; develop system requirements based on physics analysis; ensure hardware solutions align with physics requirements; perform initial tests and prototyping on test benches and assist in deployment and commissioning; fully characterize system performance with experimental diagnostics; operate and maintain RF systems and train users.
Required Qualifications
- Education: Ph.D. in Physics or related field
- Experience with RF systems at the MW level
- Experience working on a high temperature fusion experiment and/or with high temperature plasma diagnostic
- General plasma physics laboratory experience, including electronics, high vacuum hygiene, power electronics
- Experience with one or more scientific programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab, IDL)
- Database interfacing (e.g., MDSplus, MySQL)
- Experience with CAD software (e.g., SolidWorks) and/or COMSOL a plus
- Ability to work independently as well as a member of the RF Team
- Ability to coordinate work across groups, especially physics, engineering, engineering analysis and simulation
- Ability to identify and correct shortcomings in proposals and designs
- Stay abreast of technological developments in the field of RF heating of plasmas and apply those developments to TAE systems
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