| Dr
Philip Snyder, who works in General Atomics' San Diego headquarters, received
the 2014 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Nuclear Fusion Prize October
14. The award was announced at the biennial conference during the opening ceremony
of the 25th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference being held October 13-18 in St. Petersburg. Dr
Snyder won the prize for his published scientific paper judged to provide the
most impact in nuclear fusion over the last two years. Dr. Snyder has spent the
last 15 years working in fusion research at General Atomics (GA), where he serves
as Director of Theory and Computational Science for the Energy and Advanced Concepts
Group. He is part of an international effort by fusion scientists to harness
the power of the Sun to create a clean and virtually unlimited energy supply on
Earth. Under the US Department of Energy, GA runs the largest U.S. magnetic fusion
energy programme. This award recognised a scientific paper Dr Snyder wrote
and published in the journal,'Nuclear Fusion'. (All of the more than 350 papers
considered for the award were published in 2011.) His prize-winning paper was
entitled, "A first -principles predictive model of the pedestal height and width:
development, testing and ITER optimisation with the EPED model," PB Snyder, RJ
Groebner, JW Hughes, TH Osborne, M Beurskens, AW Leonard, HR Wilson and XQ Xu
2011 Nucl Fusion 51 103016. His research has led to a more accurate way
to predict the generation of energy-making plasma in a Tokamak, a fusion machine.
Pedestal height is expected to have a dramatic impact on overall fusion performance
in future fusion devices such as ITER, the massive fusion machine now being built
in France by a consortium of 35 nations including the US. In announcing
the prize, IAEA officials said, "This outstanding paper presents a compelling
model to predict pedestal parameters, and provides validation through experimental
observations across a number of machines. The work has the potential to significantly
focus the predictions of performance in future devices." Since 2006, the
IAEA has celebrated excellence in its journal, Nuclear Fusion, with its annual
prize. The award is based on papers considered to have made the greatest impact
in the fusion community in the two years following publication. The selection
is made by the journal's Board of Editors by confidential balloting. This is the
third such prize won by a GA scientist, out of the nine prizes awarded in the
world to date. This year's award was presented October 13 at the opening
ceremony of the 25th Fusion Energy Conference by IAEA Deputy Director General
Alexander Bychkov. Dr Snyder earned his PhD in astrophysical sciences (plasma
physics) from Princeton University, supported by a National Science Foundation
Fellowship, and his undergraduate degree in computational physics at Yale University.
A key element of the research described in the award-winning paper, said
Dr Snyder, is the strong collaboration between theoretical and experimental physicists,
both between the GA theory group and the on-site DIII-D experiment as well as
collaboration with researchers around the world, including at the MIT Alcator
C-Mod experiment and Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the JET Tokamak and York
Plasma Institute, both in the UK. "The results of this research allow us
to predict and optimise the performance of future fusion devices with greater
confidence," said Dr Snyder. The collaboration experience has also enabled
what he called an exciting series of experiments on the DIII-D Tokamak, including
the discovery of the high performance "Super H-Mode" regime. That is the next
step in experimentation for him on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at GA.
This is the ninth year that the IAEA has awarded an annual prize to honour
exceptional work published in Nuclear Fusion, and IOP Publishing has contributed
$2,500 towards the award. | 
