Good News for Fusion Energy Workforce Development in San Diego
Broadened Access to Fusion R&D Experiences for UC San Diego Graduate Students and other Campus Researchers is Goal of New Agreement
Published Date
Story by:
Media contact:
Topics covered:
Share This:
Article Content
In February 2025, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, an Office of Science user facility of the U.S. Department of Energy, approved a new institutional user agreement with the University of California San Diego.
What’s in the new agreement?
UC San Diego personnel, including qualified graduate students, can now apply for access to the DIII-D tokamak facility even without being directly tied to a dedicated multi-year grant.
The DIII-D tokamak is North America’s largest tokamak and an important fusion research facility. Located in San Diego, the DIII-D facility is hosted and run by General Atomics on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy. Researchers at DIII-D are working to optimize the magnetic confinement approach to achieve practical fusion energy production.
“We’re very excited about this new agreement with the DIII-D facility because it offers a defined pathway for providing exciting fusion research experiences to a broader swath of our UC San Diego community. Providing this kind of access is important for our efforts to train and inspire the fusion workforce of tomorrow,” said mechanical engineering professor Javier E. Garay, director of the UC San Diego Fusion Engineering Institute and Associate Dean for Research at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Professor Alessandro Marinoni is the Project Lead for the new user agreement with the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. Photo by David Baillot / UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Long-time DIII-D user Alessandro Marinoni, who joined the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as a professor in 2023, has been critical for finalizing the arrangement.
Marinoni’s research in magnetically controlled nuclear fusion centers around understanding plasma turbulence and how to control it. To do so, he designs experiments, as well as diagnostic and modeling tools. For this new agreement, Marinoni will serve as the project lead, and UC San Diego personnel interested in this opportunity will go through him.&
UC San Diego researchers who are interested in participating under this DIII-D agreement are encouraged to fill out this Fusion Engineering Institute form.
(The agreement does not impact researchers at UC San Diego who already have access via multiyear DOE funding or any other official agreements.)
Fusion workforce development
The new agreement will be especially valuable for UC San Diego graduate students who are interested in studying magnetic confinement and learning about fusion plasmas. According to Marinoni, graduate students can acquire significant experiential knowledge about how large experimental facilities operate, build networking connections by working closely with senior researchers from other institutions and learn from their DIII-D experiences how to design, best execute and maximize the output of compelling scientific experiments.
One of the ways Marinoni envisions UC San Diego students gaining DIII-D exposure is through short internships, facilitated by the proximity of the facility to campus.
“The students will have the opportunity to participate in cutting-edge research activities with groups that are already established and have sound research programs up and running on DIII-D,” Marinoni said.
Such internships would be mutually beneficial for students needing experience to develop their thesis topics and for the DIII-D facility needing personnel with the right training and technical backgrounds.
In this way, this new user agreement aligns well with one part of their missions that both the Fusion Engineering Institute and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility share: to develop the workforce needed to make fusion energy a practical reality.
Stay in the Know
Keep up with all the latest from UC San Diego. Subscribe to the newsletter today.
