January 9th, 2026: Professor George R. Tynan: The Opportunity and Challenge of Fusion Energy

On January 9th, Professor George R. Tynan will speak with us about recent advances in fusion energy. Research progress into the controlled fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium, which powers the stars, has put mankind on the threshold of harnessing this fundamental energy source for useful purposes. In this talk, we will first summarize what fusion is, what conditions must be reached for net energy production from fusion, and why it can play a critical role in meeting humanity’s energy needs into the far future. We then discuss the two primary approaches for fusion energy production – inertial fusion, which is produced by compressing and heating the fuel with rapid and intense energy deposition in a fusion target, and magnetic confinement fusion, in which the hot fuel is held in place by carefully constructed magnetic fields. Finally, we will summarize the present status and outlook for fusion as it transitions from a basic research program into a practical energy technology in the coming decade, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of an ambitious fusion industry which has taken root in the U.S., Japan, Europe and China.

Professor Tynan received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at UCLA, did postdoctoral research in Germany and Princeton University, and joined the faculty at UC San Diego in 1999. At UCSD he provided the first direct experimental evidence that turbulent mixing in magnetically confined plasmas could spontaneously relax into a well-ordered state that reduced the rate of particle and heat loss from the confined plasma and then showed that the same phenomena was responsible for initiating improved confinement regimes in large-scale tokamak fusion devices. More recently he has studied the fundamental processes that degrade materials exposed to the severe fusion environment with the goal to learn how to engineer better materials to enable fusion to become a practical energy technology.

He has received a number of honors, including being named as the Kazuo Iwama Endowed Chair with rank of Distinguished Professor, American Physical Society Distinguished Speaker in Plasma Physics, Global Expert in Controlled Fusion Energy Research in the People’s Republic of China, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Department of Energy Early Career Award. He also served in a number of leadership roles, including Department Chair, Associate Dean of Research, Executive Associate Dean, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. He joined the MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering Department in 2025 where he is the Norman C. Rasmussen Adjunct Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering. George is affiliated with MIT Plasma Fusion Science Center.