Areas of Expertise:

MICHAEL MAUEL was educated at MIT receiving his B.S. (1978) and his Sc.D. (1983) with a research specialty in plasma physics. While at MIT, he was awarded the Fortesque Fellowship from the IEEE and the Guillemin Prize. Following post-doctoral research at MIT he joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1985 where he is currently Professor of Applied Physics. From 2000-2006, he served as Chair of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics. At Columbia, his research focused on high temperature plasma physics, and he was awarded a Certificate of Appreciation by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1989 for his work in fusion energy. Dr. Mauel collaborated extensively with the TFTR research team at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory where he participated in advanced tokamak experiments and in the world’s first high-power D-T fusion experiments. He was a visiting scientist at DIII-D fusion experiment at General Atomics in 1994, investigating high-pressure “wall mode” instabilities and co-discovering techniques to generate internal transport barriers. At Columbia University, he built experimental programs in plasma processing in collaboration with IBM and in laboratory space physics with the support of NASA, NSF, and the AFOSR. He also co-directed the Levitated Dipole Experiment, a joint research project of Columbia University and MIT that used high-field superconducting magnets to explore the application of magnetospheric physics to the confinement of high-pressure plasma in the laboratory and first demonstrated steady-state, high-pressure plasma confinement without a toroidal field. In 1994, Mauel was named Teacher of the Year at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, and, in 2000, he received the Rose Prize for Excellence in Fusion Engineering from the Fusion Power Association. During the 2006-2007 academic years, Mauel served in the Office of International Energy and Commodity Policy at U.S. Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow, and he was awarded a Certificate of Appreciation by the Assistant Secretary of State. Dr. Mauel is a fellow of the APS and served as Chair of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. He is presently the Chair of the U.S. Burning Plasma Council and Vice-Chair of the NRC Plasma Science Committee. He has also served as member and chair of numerous other physics and policy advisory committees addressing issues concerning fusion energy science, plasma physics research and education.

Recent Comments by Michael E. Mauel

• "Mike, Coming from a physicist, I'm surprised by the way that you posed your fusion questions. Somehow, you've miss an essential point: fusion resea"
  Will Fusion Realize Its Potential?