Prof. Anne E White

Anne E. White is the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering at MIT. She received her PhD in Physics at UCLA and performed research at the Electric Tokamak (UCLA), NSTX (PPPL) and DIII-D (General Atomics) before joining MIT as a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). At MIT, Prof. White has served on a number of Institute-wide committees and currently co-chairs the MIT Climate Nucleus, charged with managing and implementing MIT’s new climate action plan. Prof. White's research focuses on magnetic fusion energy (MFE). Her work has included research in diagnostic development, turbulence and transport physics, and transport model validation on four tokamaks; Alcator C-Mod, ASDEX Upgrade, DIII-D, and NSTX-U.

At MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Professor White had served as Assistant Division Head for MFE Collaborations and ran the Gyrokinetic Simulation Working Group, and the Alcator C-Mod Transport Group. She currently sits on the federal advisory board, Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC), and serves as Chair. She helped write the 2018 FESAC Report “Transformative Enabling Capabilities for Efficient Advance Toward Fusion Energy” and the recent 2021 FESAC Report “Powering the Future: Fusion and Plasmas. The reports define the role of fusion as a transformative technology and and lay out strategic actions and recommendations for the future of the US fusion program. Anne was recently one of a select group of speakers to attend a White House Summit on a Bold Decadal Vision for Fusion Energy.

Professor White's Research: 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.