Important contributions by female researchers to fusion science - a thread.

Donna Strickland, Nobel Prize 2018. Her work allowed to create incredibly intense laser pulses which are mandatory in laser fusion.

#FusionFriday #WomenInScience #WomenInFusion

Sanae-Inoue Itoh. She contributed heavily to the model of how the transition into the H-mode works. The H-mode is a type of plasma configuration in which confinement suddenly increases, allowing to reduce the overall size of a potential fusion power plant.

Annick Pouquet. She pioneered a lot of computational & theoretical research on magneto-hydrodynamical turbulence, e.g. on the understanding of the energy transfer between different scales. While her work was about astrophysical plasmas, it is also adapted to fusion plasmas.

Xenija (Ksenija) Razumova. Since the very beginning of fusion research, she contributed to experimental research on tokamaks. Of particular importance was her achievement of a stable plasma scenario in the TM-2 tokamak, marking the beginning of the world-wide tokamak dominance.

Katherine Weimer. Her theoretical research and models of plasma equilibrium were the basis on which the early stellarators in Princeton, @PPPLab, were constructed, although she contributed to both, tokamak and stellarator research.

Sibylle Günter. She is head of Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, @PlasmaphysikIPP, home of the world largest stellarator and EU's largest tokamak. Besides her important theoretical contributions on tokamak transport, she is strongly pushing forward education in fusion.

This is just a small, far from complete list, and I ask you to add more by replying to this thread.