Fusion Power Associates award for Joe Kilkenny

The Fusion Power Associates (FPA) Board of Directors has selected NIF Scientific Diagnostic Leader Joe Kilkenny to receive a 2016 Leadership Award. The award was presented at the FPA’s 37th Annual Meeting and Symposium on “Fusion Power: An International Venture,” held recently in Washington, D.C.

Kilkenny was cited for “the leadership provided for inertial confinement fusion for nearly four decades, including pioneering work on hydrodynamic instabilities, opacity, thermal and suprathermal electron transport and advanced diagnostics at major laser facilities.” The FPA noted especially “the leadership (he) provided more recently of the National Diagnostics Program, whose goal is to develop instruments that may revolutionize inertial confinement fusion and high energy density plasma research.”

Kilkenny, vice president for high energy density physics at General Atomics, is assigned to the NIF diagnostic program as the scientific diagnostic leader. He has made major contributions to experimental inertial confinement fusion (ICF) for more than 35 years.

He was an academic at Imperial College, London, where he researched non-linear thermal transport, hydrodynamic instabilities, plasma spectroscopy and implosions. He came to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 1983 and led the ICF Program from 1995 to 2001. Experiments he led were the basis for favorable recommendations on constructing NIF. He has won the Teller Award from the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society (APS) Excellence in Plasma Physics Award and the SPIE Conrady Prize. He is a fellow of the APS.

Fusion Power Associates is a nonprofit, tax-exempt research and educational foundation, providing information on the status of fusion development and other applications of plasma science and fusion research. FPA Leadership Awards have been presented since 1980 to individuals who have shown outstanding leadership qualities in accelerating the development of fusion.