FPN07-66

Hungarian Nuclear Society Honors Miklos Porkolab

December 7, 2007

The Hungarian Nuclear Society awarded The Karoly Simony Memorial Plaque and Prize to Professor Miklos Porkolab at its annual meeting November 29 in Budapest. The award was given in recognition of "outstanding achievements and contributions to plasma physics and fusion research." This is a newly established award and Porkolab, who is director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is the first recipient. The prize is in memory of Karoly Simony, who was the first Hungarian fusion research scientist, working in the 1950s at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Central Physics Research Institute in Budapest.

Prof. Porkolab was born in Budapest, immigrated to Canada in 1957, and received a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from the University of British Columbia in 1963. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1967 and then joined the staff of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In 1977 he joined MIT as a professor in the Physics Department and since then has led several pioneering experiments in radio-frequency heating and non-inductive current drive in tokamaks. Since 1995 he has been the director of the PSFC at MIT. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member and past chairman of the Fusion Power Associates Board of Directors.

He can be reached at porkolab@psfc.mit.edu