Ballinger '16 Wins APS Outstanding Undergraduate Poster Award

Nov 18 2014

Sean Ballinger, a junior majoring in applied physics, recently brought home the Outstanding Undergraduate Poster Award from the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics. He was recognized for his display, “Optimizing Plasma Boundary Control in Superconducting Tokamaks,” at the Division’s 56th annual meeting, held in New Orleans in October. Ballinger’s poster—which presented cutting-edge scholarship on understanding shape control, quantifying controllability, and offline optimization of strongly coupled shapes—was based on his collaborative summer research at General Atomics’ DIII-D tokamak in San Diego. DIII-D is among the largest facilities in the world for exploring the possibilities of clean, magnetically confined fusion energy production.

Ballinger, an Egleston Scholar, joins a rich tradition of Columbians doing acclaimed work with the global DIII-D research program, including Applied Physics Professors Michael Mauel, Gerald Navratil, and Francesco Volpe.

Jeff Ballinger '16

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