2025 Sherwood Fusion Theory Conference
Elizabeth Paul, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics, hosted the 2025 Sherwood Fusion Theory Conference as chair of the Local Organizing Committee and member of the Executive Committee. The meeting took place April 7-9, 2025 at the New Yorker Hotel in midtown. The conference has a long history, the first meeting being held in 1952 when the classified US fusion research effort went under the codename “Project Sherwood". It continues to be the primary annual meeting for theoretical and computational fusion research. The 2025 meeting drew 152 registered participants, including 16 international participants. The program included 12 invited talks, two plenary lectures, three poster sessions, and a panel discussion on “The role of theory and computation in advancing the FPP”. On the first day of the conference, the participants enjoyed a reception and plasma lab tour in the Mudd building in celebration of the launch of the Columbia Fusion Research Center.
Every year, outstanding student poster presentations are recognized at the conference banquet. In 2025, Applied Physics PhD student Amelia Chambliss was awarded the Bill Dorland award for her presentation "Quadratic fux-minimizing maps for characterization of energetic particle transport mechanisms in quasihelical and quasiaxisymmetric stellarators”.
