Research Scientist

About the role

The Research Scientist 2 will conduct fundamental and applied research in Disruptions, MHD stability and control, and Machine Learning applications to fusion science and technology.

Responsibilities

• Work in a leadership role as part of the newly established Data Science division at MIT’s PSFC, liaising with the Magnetic Fusion Experiments (MFE) and the Theory & Computing divisions.
• Lead or co-lead research topics in the PSFC Disruptions Group (https://disruptions.mit.edu/).
• Be involved in the management of several sponsored collaborations, in both publicly and privately funded programs.
• Pursue their own research interests in plasma physics and fusion; take on the supervision of graduate students and postdoctoral associates; contribute original research to the PSFC program; and produce work for publication in scientific journals and present at scientific conferences.
• Dedicate some research efforts to the development of ML-driven use cases for the DOE sponsored programs, either in the Tokamak Research program or in support FIRE collaboratives, and to the development of Disruption Prevention, Avoidance, and Mitigation strategies for SPARC and ARC.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Physics, Nuclear Engineering, Plasma Science, or a related field.
• Experience with plasma physics, MHD stability, or fusion energy research.
• Experience with experimental planning, experimental data analysis, and model development and deployment in control systems.
• Familiarity with Machine Learning and data science applications.
• Four years of experience post PhD conducting original scientific research as well as publishing in scientific journals.
• Demonstrated skills in scientific programming (Python preferred), and common open-source software development practices.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a multi-institutional environment, including staff and students from MIT, other universities, national laboratories, and private industry.
• Commitment to mentoring and outreach in support of a diverse research community.

Preferred

• Familiarity with large-scale data management, and FAIR data principles.