Evelyn Reynolds

“That was your warmup. Now we’re really in the thick of it.” 
Daniel Korsun ’20 is reflecting on his four years of undergraduate preparation and research at MIT as he enters “the thick” of graduate study at the Institute’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). The nuclear science and engineering student’s “warmup” included enough fusion research on the SPARC tokamak to establish him as part of the PSFC community.
“I already have this network of peers and professors and staff,” he notes with enthusiasm. “I’ve been kind of training for this for four years.”
Korsun arrived on the MIT campus in 2016 prepared to focus on chemistry, but quickly developed a fascination for the nuclear side of physics. Postponing one of his undergraduate course requirements, he indulged in Professor Mike Short’s Introduction to Nuclear Science class. After that he was “super hooked,” especially by the subject of fusion, a carbon-free, potentially endless source of energy.
Learning from his class colleague Monica Pham ’19 about a summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) opening at the PSFC, Korsun applied and quickly found himself in the center’s accelerator laboratory, which is co-operated jointly with the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE).
“I’ve always been interested in clean energy, advanced solar, climate change. When I actually got into the depths of fusion, seeing what the PSFC was doing — nothing ever compared.”
Korsun’s continuing excitement for research at the PSFC ultimately landed him in MIT’s SuperUROP undergraduate research program during his junior year. Guided by NSE Assistant Professor Zach Hartwig and his graduate students, Korsun was learning about the fusion research that remains his focus today, including SPARC, a next-generation fusion experiment that is prototype to a planned energy-producing fusion furnace called ARC.
Both these tokamak designs are being developed by MIT in association with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), and are dependent on game-changing, high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape. Magnets created from this tape will wrap around the tokamak’s donut-shaped vacuum chamber, confining the hot plasma.
Korsun is exploring the effect of radiation, produced during the fusion process, on the HTS tapes. To do this he needs to test the critical current of the tapes, the maximum amount of current a superconductor can conduct while remaining in a superconducting state. Because radiation damage impacts how well superconductors can carry current, the critical current of the tapes changes in relation to how much they are irradiated.
“You can irradiate anything at room temperature,” he notes. “You just blast it with protons or neutrons. But that information is not really useful, because your SPARC and ARC magnets will be at cryogenic temperatures, and they’ll be operating in extremely strong magnetic fields as well. What if these low temperatures and high fields actually impact how the material responds to damage?”
Pursuing this question as an undergraduate took him with his teammates as far as Japan and New Zealand, where they could use special facilities to test the critical current of HTS tape under relevant conditions. “On our Japan trip to the High Field Laboratory for Superconducting Materials at Tohoku University, we conducted the SPARC project’s first-ever tests of HTS tape at the actual SPARC toroidal field magnetic field and temperature. It was a grueling trip — we generally worked about 15 or 16 hours a day in the lab — but incredible.”
The necessity of leaving campus in the spring of his senior year due to the Covid lockdown meant that Korsun would graduate virtually.
“It was not ideal. I’m not the kind of person to sit on my parents’ couch for six months.”
He made the most of his summer by securing a virtual internship at CFS, where he helped to refine ARC’s design based on what had been learned from SPARC research.
“Crazy amounts of knowledge have been gained that were not even fathomable five years ago, when it was designed.”
Korsun looks forward to the day when SPARC is operating, inspiring even more updates to the ARC design.
“It’s so easy to get excited about SPARC,” he says. “Everyone is, and I am, too. But it’s not quite the end goal. We’ve got to keep an eye on the distance.” More

Pablo Duenas-Martinez and Dharik Mallapragrada first met on opposite sides of a sponsored research project through the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). They worked together to define a project to study the long-term evolution of the electricity sector in India and the impacts of technological and policy drivers. Duenas-Martinez guided the research direction on MITEI’s end, and Mallapragada provided input from an industry perspective.
Mallapragada, who earned his PhD in chemical engineering from Purdue University, had been working in the energy and petrochemical sector for about five years at two different companies when he came to a realization.
“As I took on a bunch of different roles at the companies, I came to realize the connections between the applied research I was pursuing and the policy implications in the context of decarbonizing energy systems, but somehow the framing of the problems I was investigating didn’t sit right with me,” he says. He came to MIT because he wanted to think about the issue in broader terms. “The main challenge in my mind is to address economy-wide decarbonization while simultaneously expanding access to energy. It is not just the end state, but the entire trajectory of this transition that matters. I think everybody recognizes what the end goal is. But there are no real clear pathways that have been identified, and I’ve been eager to contribute toward addressing the gaps in this area of energy research.”
At MITEI, Mallapragada utilizes his engineering training and industry background while learning about all the other elements that are necessary to be able to address the grand challenge of decarbonization, which he describes as “really very multidisciplinary in terms of scope and applications.”
Mallapragada joined fellow research scientists Duenas-Martinez and Karen Tapia-Ahumada at the Electric Power Systems (EPS) Center, one of MITEI’s Low-Carbon Energy Centers. The center unites MIT researchers, faculty, and students to accelerate the transition to a clean electric power sector. The center’s mission is threefold:
to examine the impacts of emerging technologies, business models, regulatory frameworks, and policy dynamics;
to investigate solutions ranging from developing new analytical tools for improved decision-making in the industry to vetting breakthrough technologies; and
to serve as a convening entity to engage industry and policymakers and provide thought leadership through rigorous analysis of the clean energy transition.
Steering EPS Center projects
Mallapragada, Duenas-Martinez, and Tapia-Ahumada all bring a wealth of experience to their roles as the researchers who shape the direction of EPS Center projects. Mallapragada, the newest addition to the team, credits his previous work in the energy industry and personal experience working with academia on sponsored projects with helping him to “hit the ground running” at MITEI, in terms of engaging with research sponsors and guiding projects.
“Oftentimes, research scientists become conduits for communication within an organization. Our research helps people from different sides of the business engage with each other in new ways,” says Mallapragada. “Our role is not just to do the research, but actually to persuade people to think about problems and challenges in new ways, using evidence generated from modeling and analysis.”
Duenas-Martinez is no stranger to helping people in different sectors — from power and gas utilities to government and regulatory agencies — think outside the box to improve energy systems around the world.
He grew up in Madrid, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, a master’s in electric power systems, and a doctorate in electrical engineering at Comillas Pontifical University. He first came into contact with MIT during his PhD work in 2012, before joining MITEI as a postdoc in 2014. “I also received a bachelor’s in economics from a distance learning university two years ago,” he says.
A number of his projects touch on the impacts of natural gas on the electric power system, but his work has started moving in a different direction. “Lately, I’ve been working on the security of energy supply and researching the distribution side and all the changes that are happening in the electric power system,” says Duenas-Martinez.
Tapia-Ahumada, an electrical engineer, joined MITEI as a postdoc in 2011 and became a research scientist in 2014, but she has been at MIT for far longer. Like Mallapragada and Duenas-Martinez, her journey to MITEI spans years and continents. She grew up in Chile and came to MIT in 2003 after living and working in Argentina following her graduation from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
While her husband pursued his MBA, Tapia-Ahumada was accepted into MIT’s Technology and Policy Program, where she completed her graduate degree and continued on to earn her PhD in engineering systems.
“I did both my master’s and PhD while I was having my kids — so I finished everything all at once,” she says. Tapia-Ahumada completed postdoc work at MIT and finally landed at MITEI as a research scientist. “It has been a long and a rewarding road for me here at MIT,” she says.
Tapia-Ahumada’s research interests include the operation and planning of electric power systems, renewable energy generation, distributed energy resources, and the market and regulatory structures required to support the development of sustainable energy systems.
Roles at MITEI
Mallapragada, Duenas-Martinez, and Tapia-Ahumada manage separate projects and teams within the EPS Center’s portfolio, but they utilize their different backgrounds to work toward the common goal of implementing widespread electricity access while decarbonizing the electric power sector.
They each define their role slightly differently.
“In some ways, I play the role of a principal investigator on a research project, while also being fairly hands-on with the research — not only doing some of it, but also defining what the research objectives are and then working with students to meet the research goals,” says Mallapragada. He notes that he primarily works with graduate students from MIT’s Technology and Policy Program.
Duenas-Martinez concurs with Mallapragada, adding that establishing and managing the human capital for a project is a major part of sponsored research projects. “Sometimes we work together with a postdoc or a student — and sometimes, as in the cases of both Karen and me, we have even been the postdoc or the student on the project,” he says.
Of equal importance, he says, is working with international students. Students from around the world often contact MITEI research scientists about topics of interest, and MITEI will invite them to come work on a project to help enrich the EPS Center’s work with outside ideas.
They also work with “UROPs” — students who receive funding through MIT’s vast Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which connects students with faculty to work on new or established research projects. “My experience with UROP students has always been great,” says Duenas-Martinez. “They are motivated and very, very smart.”
Tapia-Ahumada explains that they are all very hands-on when it comes to helping students succeed. “We [research scientists] are all developing particular modeling tools, so we know the details of the tools, and then when we bring on students, we are starting from scratch. They need the extra push from us at the beginning to learn how to set up and run the models, and then, once they are up to speed, we supervise their research throughout the course of the project,” she explains.
The three research scientists also regularly serve as advisors for master’s theses, and work with postdocs to help them figure out where they’d like to end up post-MITEI.
The EPS Center researchers do not work in fixed groups on every project. In fact, Mallapragada feels fortunate to have been part of quite a few different teams working on MITEI projects. “I’ve been able to build my own network that spans across MIT, rather than having a team that I work with on a day-to-day basis. I’m kind of like a puzzle piece that fits in wherever I’m needed,” he says.
Tapia-Ahumada observes that research scientists act as a link between professors and particular projects. “Sometimes the professors provide the high-level ideas, and then we are there to help work out the smaller details of the project,” she notes.
Mallapragada says MITEI research scientists help faculty by providing greater context to, and perspective on, the fundamental research that may be happening within academic departments. “We don’t necessarily operate within the realm of technology development or fundamental science research ourselves, but we help faculty contextualize the work they are doing and make it appealing to an industrial sponsor, who may not otherwise be thinking about these issues from a long-term perspective. That is something that has an appeal not only within the electric power systems sector, but also across all the end-use sectors,” he says. “We fit into the technology development pipeline as a contact center for defining what topics need to be focused on by industry, policymakers, and academia in order to accelerate the sustainable energy transition.”
Research highlights and planned trajectories
Of the many projects they’ve participated in at MITEI, a few remain highlights. Duenas-Martinez counts MITEI’s 2016 Utility of the Future study as a particular favorite. The study addressed the technology, policy, and business models that are shaping the evolution of the delivery of electricity services.
“We were on the cutting edge of knowledge. We were doing some really deep analysis of what’s going to happen in the next few years, with all the transformation that is happening in the electric power systems,” says Duenas-Martinez. “This was a consortium project, which was something very new for me. We had 10 companies involved and also an expert advisory board, so there were long discussions with large groups about very hot topics at the time, and it was a great learning experience because I was new. It was so rewarding.”
One of Tapia-Ahumada’s favorite projects focused on Iceland. “It was fascinating because of the topic itself. Iceland’s energy is almost 100 percent renewable, so it was very interesting to learn about some of the challenges they are facing in order to ensure the long-term security of electricity supply in an economic manner while preserving environmental goals.” She also enjoyed having the opportunity to work with both Duenas-Martinez and colleagues from Comillas Pontifical University in Spain. “It was an international group of people working on a very relevant topic,” she says.
Tapia-Ahumada, along with Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, a visiting professor from Comillas Pontifical University, also worked on a MITEI Seed Fund project with Mei Yuan, a research scientist at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. They developed an integrated framework that combined electricity and economic modeling with policy analysis of carbon cap-and-trade, renewable portfolio standards, and other energy and climate mechanisms used in the United States. Tapia-Ahumada says she found the project rewarding because it allowed the researchers to decide how to expand their modeling tools and determine which scenarios to analyze.
Mallapragada came on board with MITEI as part of a sponsored research project looking into the factors likely to impact the delivered cost of electricity in future low-carbon grids and the role for emerging technologies like battery energy storage. He considers it to be a highlight of his time at MITEI. “The fairly broad project scope meant that I had significant autonomy in terms of refining the research questions and approach, and it led us to identify some interesting insights on the long-term value of battery energy storage in power systems,” he says. He plans to continue pursuing research on the role that hydrogen will play in the future clean energy system — a question that has been of increasing importance during his time at MITEI. “I’ve seen a clear, increasing emphasis on opportunities for clean hydrogen, and I’ve been fortunate to get involved with a few projects, some of which have been published, but others for which the results will be coming along within the next year or so.”
According to Duenas-Martinez, the majority of the changes happening in the electric power sector are happening at the consumer level. He plans to explore how the adoption of new technologies and distributed resources is going to impact the power system in general. “I want to know how energy communities will migrate to new technologies and how consumer empowerment and choice enter into the equation. What will the future of our electric power system look like?” he asks.
“The work that we are doing at MITEI is very wide in scope, and our focus on the electric power system also encompasses electrification, which involves other sectors of the economy,” adds Tapia-Ahumada. “We are thinking hard about how to expand our research scope to incorporate other sectors, such as energy-intensive heating and transportation.”
She aims to better understand the economic signals that consumers receive and the effects of electricity retail prices. “We are exploring how the retail price of electricity could be set to result in an efficient economic response — and how on-site energy generation will affect electricity consumption.”
Tapia-Ahumada adds that she thinks of herself as a bridge between research methodology and real-world applications. “We have many methodologies, but then we need to find the right sort of abstraction in order for us to develop appropriate tools that can produce meaningful results, and then find ways to communicate those findings to nontechnical audiences so they can understand the potential applications and various pathways.”
In addition to being a research scientist, Tapia-Ahumada is MITEI’s digital learning fellow, a new role at MITEI that means she is responsible for helping develop and implement MITEI’s online course curriculum.
Researching through a pandemic
Of course, learning and research in the age of Covid-19 looks a bit different, especially for those with children at home.
“We are researchers, but we are also primarily parents of kids of various ages,” says Mallapragada. “My own personal experience has been that, on the face of it, the pandemic seems like something you can handle — but as the weeks have gone by, the situation has evolved, just like the disease.” While he is grateful for the extra time with his son, it seems like the rest of the world has “kind of normalized,” he notes.
“It’s not that anybody’s pressuring you to do things, but it’s just that you also want to normalize and work at your pre-Covid-19 pace. And so you’re kind of torn in different directions,” he says. “I feel like in some ways, it has been a lot harder now than in the beginning, when maybe you were thinking of this as a short-term thing that would soon evolve into something that resembles normalcy. So — I have mixed feelings. Obviously, there are good days and bad days,” reflects Mallapragada.
“I think we’re all parents here, so we have some personal situations at home to deal with, and we’ve also been enjoying the extra family time, but I will say that research-wise, we haven’t really scaled back much,” says Duenas-Martinez. “We have all been working equally as hard at home as when we were at the office. There are long nights, weekends are like weekdays, but overall, it’s been pretty good.”
“For me, the transition has been okay,” says Tapia-Ahumada. “My boys are already teenagers. They are very independent and they’re close in age, so they keep themselves busy.”
Tapia-Ahumada also says there has been no difference when it comes to working with research sponsors. For example, she has been working with a sponsor since before the pandemic hit that is based in both San Francisco and China.
“Before the Covid crisis, we were working with them remotely, so there have been no changes there. It has been good; they have kept collaborating with us. And they are also very conscious of our time constraints,” she says. “Everyone has been flexible, which helps because I think we’re all in the same boat — everyone understands that we have family commitments and some things that we didn’t foresee. But it’s been good. With research you always keep going — it’s never-ending.”
Energy access and communications challenges
The three also offer insights into what they consider to be the most important challenges to solve in the energy space. While decarbonization is certainly an urgent issue, the team also considers expanded energy access and the accessible, effective communication of research findings to be other major obstacles to overcome.
Duenas-Martinez says he remains focused on the long-term outlook for energy systems and on other critical problems, including how to provide reliable and affordable electricity to those who are still without power. “We still have about 1 billion people without access to good electricity. This is one topic that MITEI is focused on: We are working with the Universal Energy Access Lab to facilitate energy access to those around the globe,” says Duenas-Martinez. “We have been developing tools and we are in close contact with multilateral organizations, and governments and authorities from different countries to try to make this transformation possible.”
Another major barrier to the clean energy transition is the lack of a common language within academia. “I have different styles for working with electrical engineers versus economists. It’s very challenging to find a common language so that multidisciplinary teams can understand each other,” says Tapia-Ahumada.
In addition, it’s hard to get the research into the hands of those who can do something with it and effect real change, such as policymakers and the general public. “How do we communicate with lay people and policymakers in order for them to understand the need for decarbonization, where we are trying to go, and what we are trying to accomplish?” she asks.
Duenas-Martinez adds that he is always taken aback by how hard it is to explain what is going on in the energy world to the general public and to combat preconceived notions and pervasive misinformation: “There are many hot topics, starting with decarbonization and local air pollution, where people already have pieces of information — but it’s not always the correct information, and it has surprised me how difficult it is to explain the reality and help them to see the fuller energy picture.”
Mallapragada, too, is focused on engaging with academia, industry, policymakers, and the public in a meaningful way. “There’s an increasing demand from society for science to be relevant to social issues and making that connection — so what may not have been part of the job description of a scientist previously is now a significant part of our role. It’s not just about doing good research and publishing papers, but there is the added responsibility to take the extra step to communicate the findings effectively and in a nuanced way,” says Mallapragada.
Working the clean energy transition
Finding the balance between solving energy problems and being realistic about the best paths forward can also be a challenge.
“At the end of the day, I want to be a constructive contributor in solving climate and energy challenges. And sometimes the constructive contributor has to be the one to say, ‘Hey, we don’t have all the answers, and we need to pump the brakes. Otherwise, we might end up going down a path that we may not like down the road,’” says Mallapragada.
“We know that 2050 is the target that everyone has in mind for reaching our decarbonization goals,” adds Tapia-Ahumada. “If we are to make a successful energy transition, electricity prices will be key. We’ll keep working on our simulation tools. They are not going to be the final answer, but they will identify the various pathways that the energy or electricity sector may take. This information is going to be useful for regulators, utilities, and other stakeholders working on the transition.”
As the world continues to work toward a sustainable energy future, Duenas-Martinez says MITEI researchers will offer a set of solutions that could help move us down the path, but not dictate the path itself.
“We are not here to say what should be done. We are more here just to provide food for thought,” says Duenas-Martinez. “We are doing the analysis, we are testing different scenarios, we are innovating and developing lots of solutions. We don’t know which solution is the best one, but we are doing the best we can to try to improve our future by providing industry and policy makers with the tools to solve our energy challenges.”
This article appears in the Autumn 2020 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.  More

The pursuit of fusion as a safe, carbon-free, always-on energy source has intensified in recent years, with a number of organizations pursuing aggressive timelines for technology demonstrations and power plant designs. New-generation superconducting magnets are a critical enabler for many of these programs, which creates growing need for sensors, controls, and other infrastructure that will allow the magnets to operate reliably in the harsh conditions of a commercial fusion power plant.
A collaborative group led by Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) doctoral student Erica Salazar recently took a step forward in this area with a promising new method for quick detection of a disruptive abnormality, quench, in powerful high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. Salazar worked with NSE Assistant Professor Zach Hartwig of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and Michael Segal of spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), along with members of the Swiss CERN research center and the Robinson Research Institute (RRI) at Victoria University in New Zealand to achieve the results, which were published in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology.
Stanching quench
Quench occurs when part of a magnet’s coil shifts out of a superconducting state, where it has no electrical resistance, and into a normal resistive state. This causes the massive current flowing through the coil, and stored energy in the magnet, to quickly convert into heat, and potentially cause serious internal damage to the coil.
While quench is a problem for all systems using superconducting magnets, Salazar’s team is focused on preventing it in power plants based on magnetic-confinement fusion devices. These types of fusion devices, known as tokamaks, will maintain a plasma at extremely high temperature, similar to the core of a star, where fusion can occur and generate net-positive energy output. No physical material can handle those temperatures, so magnetic fields are used to confine, control, and insulate the plasma. The new HTS magnets allow the tokamak’s toroidal (doughnut-shaped) magnetic enclosure to be both stronger and more compact, but interruptions in the magnetic field from quench would halt the fusion process — hence the importance of improved sensor and control capabilities.
With this in mind, Salazar’s group sought a way of quickly spotting temperature changes in the superconductors, which can indicate nascent quench incidents. Their test bed was a novel superconducting cable developed in the SPARC program known as VIPER, which incorporates assemblies of thin steel tape coated with HTS material, stabilized by a copper former and jacketed in copper and stainless steel, with a central channel for cryogenic cooling. Coils of VIPER can generate magnetic fields two-to-three times stronger than the older-generation low-temperature superconducting (LTS) cable; this translates into vastly higher fusion output power, but also makes the energy density of the field higher, which places more onus on quench detection to protect the coil.
A focus on fusion’s viability
Salazar’s team, like the entire SPARC research and development effort, approached its work with a focus on eventual commercialization, usability, and ease of manufacture, with an eye toward accelerating fusion’s viability as an energy source. Her background as a mechanical engineer with General Atomics during production and testing of LTS magnets for the international ITER fusion facility in France gave her perspective on sensing technologies and the critical design-to-production transition.
“Moving from manufacturing into design helped me think about whether what we’re doing is a practical implementation,” explains Salazar. Moreover, her experience with voltage monitoring, the traditional quench-detection approach for superconducting cable, led her to think a different approach was needed. “During fault testing of the ITER magnets, we observed electrical breakdown of the insulation occurring at the voltage tap wires. Because I now consider anything that breaks high-voltage insulation to be a major risk point, my perspective on a quench detection system was, what do we do to minimize these risks, and how can we make it as robust as possible?”
A promising alternative was temperature measurement using optical fibers inscribed with micro-patterns known as fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). When broadband light is directed at an FBG, most of the light passes through, but one wavelength (determined by the spacing, or period, of the grating’s pattern) is reflected. The reflected wavelength varies slightly with both temperature and strain, so placement of a series of gratings with different periods along the fiber allows independent temperature monitoring of each location.
While FBGs have been leveraged across many different industries for measurement of strain and temperature, including on much smaller superconducting cables, they had not been used on larger cables with high current densities like VIPER. “We wanted to take good work by others and put it to the test on our cable design,” says Salazar. VIPER cable was well-adapted for this approach, she notes, because of its stable structure, which is designed to withstand the intense electrical, mechanical, and electromagnetic stresses of a fusion magnet’s environment.
A new extension on FBGs
A novel option was provided by the RRI team in the form of ultra-long fiber Bragg gratings (ULFBGs) — a series of 9-milimeter FBGs spaced 1 mm apart. These essentially behave as one long quasi-continuous FBG, but with the advantage that the combined grating length can be meters long instead of millimeters. While conventional FBGs can monitor temperature changes at localized points, ULFBGs can monitor simultaneously occurring temperature changes along their entire length, allowing them to provide very rapid detection of temperature variation, irrespective of the location of the heat source.
Although this means that the precise location of hot spots is obscured, it works very well in systems where early identification of a problem is of utmost importance, as in an operating fusion device. And a combination of ULFBGs and FBGs could provide both spatial and temporal resolution.
An opportunity for hands-on verification came via a CERN team working with standard FBGs on accelerator magnets at the CERN facility in Geneva, Switzerland. “They thought FBG technology, including the ULFBG concept, would work well on this type of cable and wanted to look into it, and got on board with the project,” says Salazar.
In 2019, she and colleagues journeyed to the SULTAN facility in Villigen, Switzerland, a leading center for superconducting cable evaluation operated by the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), which is affiliated with Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, to evaluate samples of VIPER cable with optical fibers set into grooves on their outer copper jackets. Their performance was compared to traditional voltage taps and resistance temperature sensors.
Quick detection under realistic conditions
The researchers were able to quickly and reliably detect small temperature disturbances under realistic operating conditions, with the fibers picking up early-stage quench growth before thermal runaway more effectively than the voltage taps. When compared to the challenging electromagnetic environment seen in a fusion device, the fibers’ signal-to-noise ratio was several times better; in addition, their sensitivity increased as quench regions expanded, and the fibers’ response times could be tuned. This enabled them to detect quench events tens of seconds faster than voltage taps, especially during slowly propagating quenches — a characteristic unique to HTS which is exceptionally difficult for voltage taps to detect in the tokamak environment, and which can lead to localized damage.
“[U]sing fiber optic technologies for HTS magnets quench detection or as a dual verification method with voltage show great promise,” says the group’s write-up, which also cites the manufacturability and minimal technological risk of the approach.
“The development of sensitive temperature measurements with FBGs is a very promising approach to the challenging problem of protecting HTS coils from damage during quenches,” observes Kathleen Amm, director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory Magnet Division, who was not affiliated with the research effort. “This is critical to the development of game-changing technologies like compact fusion, where practical, high-field, high-temperature superconducting magnets are a key technology. It also has the potential to solve the problem of quench protection for many industrial HTS applications.”
Work is underway on refining the location and installation of the fibers, including the type of adhesive used, and also on investigating how the fibers can be installed in other cables and on different platforms, says Salazar.
“We’re having a lot of dialogue with CFS and continuing to coordinate with the RRI team’s ULFBG technology, and I am currently creating a 3D model of quench dynamics, so we can better understand and predict what quench would look like under different conditions,” states Salazar. “Then we can develop design recommendations for the detection system, like the type and spacing of the gratings, so it can detect in the desired length of time. That will allow the controls engineers and the engineers working on quench detection algorithms to write and optimize their code.”
Salazar praised the experimental team’s outstanding collegiality, noting, “the collaboration with RRI and CERN was special. We all converged in Switzerland, worked hard together, and had fun putting our efforts in and getting great results.”
Funding for this research was provided by CFS. More

The classroom in fall 2020 looked very different than it did when WGS.160/STS.021 (Science Activism: Gender, Race, and Power) ran for the first time in 2019. Zoom and virtual breakout rooms had replaced circles of chairs, but the shifts made the class no less immersive and urgent for its students.
In fact, the pandemic context made the core questions of this new survey class all the more vivid: What roles have U.S. scientists and technologists played as activists in crucial social issues and movements following WWII? What are their motivations, responsibilities, and strategies for organizing? What is their impact?Scientists have been on the front lines of active citizenship and policy engagement in recent years in very visible ways — in the People’s Climate Movement, in controlling the global Covid-19 pandemic, and in testimony about biases in facial recognition in Congress, to name just a few.
As students in the Science Activism class have learned, this engagement isn’t a new phenomenon. There is a long history of scientists championing important issues, policy positions, and public education by contributing their scientific knowledge and perspectives. Case studies in this course include the civil rights movement, the nuclear freeze campaign, climate science and action, environmental justice, Vietnam War protests, the March 4 Movement at MIT, and advocating for gender equality in STEM fields.Reflecting the layered and intersecting issues this class explores, it is listed in both the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) and in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. From the research bench to the policy tableScientific knowledge is now critical for public understanding and sound policy for most of today’s most critical issues — from climate to human health to food security — and MIT students are eager to understand how their works interact with social realities and how they can lend their expertise to advancing better conditions and policies.“The class was informed by the increasing efforts by scientists to engage in public policy not only at the ballot box, or by providing testimony,” says Ed Bertschinger, professor of physics, who led the initial class in 2019 as well as the 2020 class. “More scientists are also taking up causes of activism. That’s been true at MIT and around the country.”
As a faculty affiliate of the WGS program, Bertschinger notes that science has never been purely objective or detached from society. “Activism is a way for groups with less power in democratic societies to have their voices heard in order to effect change,” he observes. “Scientists can no longer take for granted that their results speak for themselves.”Bertschinger recalls that his first experience with activism was in graduate school, in the 1980s, when he served as an organizer for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. “I was following the lead of an MIT group,” reflects Bertschinger, “including scholars such as the late Randall Forsberg and Philip Morrison, who were leaders in the nuclear disarmament effort in the U.S.”Bridging the gapHis students now are similarly broadening their areas of academic interest into awareness of the context, impact, and influence their respective fields have in society.For Eleane Lema, a senior majoring in chemistry/biology and minoring in anthropology, the draw of Science Activism came from a sense of disconnection between her academic life as a scientist and her drive to make a positive social impact. The class subjects dovetail with her explorations of environmental justice and the unequal benefits and harms scientific change has for different communities.Taking MIT’s mission “for the betterment of humankind” to heart since her first year at the Institute, Lema seeks ways to combine her technical education and her wish to engage in meaningful social work. This past summer, for instance, she had a health policy internship through MIT’s Washington Internship program, a longstanding initiative led by Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and founding director of the nonpartisan MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
“WGS.160 is an opportunity to learn about the positive influences scientists have made in addressing the world’s biggest challenges,” says Lema. “By bridging science and social issues, this class shows us real, practical ways to embody MIT’s mission to serve humankind.” A duty to learnEmily Condon, another senior in the class this fall, also sees WGS.160 as an opportunity to understand her own social responsibilities as a scientist. “With the recent Black Lives Matter movement events and the current political climate, I felt a responsibility to educate myself on what I, as a student of science and engineering, could contribute to ending violence and discrimination against Black communities.”“The most profound idea that I’ve learned in this class is that science is not entirely objective,” reflects Condon. “There are always biases about what science implies or what scientific problems are important to study. Providing more spaces for BIPOC scientists to direct the course of research is essential to diversifying perspectives and approaches to science.”
Condon followed the tangible effects of such biases as she studied the material impacts of climate change and its roots as a social, as well as a scientific, problem. “Underserved communities are disproportionately impacted by the negative effects of climate change, and recognizing that can help scientists and engineers direct efforts to aid the people in those communities.”
For senior Kate Pearce, who is majoring in computer science and biology with a minor in math, the class is a chance to connect her longtime interest in science and activism. It has also given her a greater sense of continued agency over her own technical projects by learning how scientists have been able to anticipate and influence how their innovations will impact people, rather than simply allowing political and economic systems to determine how their work will be used.
The class, in both runs to date, has been composed primarily of MIT undergraduates focused on technical fields.Like their professor, the students come to the WGS program as interdisciplinary thinkers, pursuing a fuller and more nuanced sense of their work’s place in a volatile world. The program is designed to enable just that understanding — drawing on expertise across the Institute, from physicists to philosophers to poets, to provide analytical frameworks for the examination of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality — and how these aspects of human identity intersect with the life and issues of society.“The feminist lens of Science Activism really intrigued me,” Pearce adds, “especially as applied to how science and social change are motivated and executed.” An active MIT historyTopics in Science Activism take a broad view of recent decades, examining Vietnam War protests by scientists, genetic engineering, and the birth of modern environmentalism in the United States. There is a special focus on activism at MIT in particular, from the 1960s to present, including the March 4 Movement.
That movement began in 1969, when research and regular teaching at MIT slowed as students, faculty, and staff paused to protest the war in Vietnam and the Institute’s links to the military. Similar themes echo to the present day, with students, faculty, and staff opposing military solutions to international conflicts and broadening MIT’s engagement into social and economic justice.For Lema, the course has also provided insight into what successful activism looks like in projects like bringing awareness to the climate crisis. “MIT has played an integral role in the history of science activism, and I hope every MIT student gets the opportunity to learn about this history and discover how they can become activists for causes they are passionate about.”
Joining the conversationLike many of MIT’s humanistic courses, Science Activism is discussion-based: students build a foundational understanding from assigned readings and come to the classroom (live or virtual) prepared to debate and discuss. Guest speakers, such as Harvard Medical School Professor Jon Beckwith, who has led a Harvard University course focused on activism and the life sciences, broadened and deepened the conversation in the class’s first iteration by adding the perspectives of specialists in different disciplines.
This year the class welcomed via Zoom a number of new guest speakers, including Jin In, an advocate for women’s empowerment; Arwa Mboya, a former research assistant at the MIT Media Lab; and Steve Penn, a prominent MIT activist of the 1980s and ’90s. As a discussion-based class, the students’ insights are the engine of the class experience, and Bertschinger dedicates the majority of class time to breakout rooms so each student has a chance to thoroughly engage with ideas and questions.  “I have been so impressed by the passion and insight that my peers in this class provide,” says Pearce. “Since people are so engaged and passionate about these topics, the breakout rooms always lead to wonderful discussions, and we must struggle to end as the timer ticks down.”
For instance, the climate crisis — one of the foremost issues of the students’ lives — inspires intense, far-ranging conversations as class members trace the roots of environmentalism and think together about how best to respond to the multi-faceted crisis. The students’ experience gives the course an ever-expanding horizon as students’ insights widen discussions around intersectional equality in the sciences and in society.
“It was a great pleasure to teach the class last year; I learned a lot from working with the students and from developing case studies,” reflects Bertschinger. “It’s important for the MIT community to pay attention to the activism on campus — and to help our students develop the wisdom and the capacity to use their voices to the fullest effect in the world.”
Story by MIT SHASS CommunicationsEditorial team: Alison Lanier and Emily Hiestand More

Climate and energy are two key areas on the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda. Here, Robert C. Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), asks Ernest J. Moniz — professor emeritus post-tenure, MITEI’s founding director, special advisor to MIT President Rafael Reif, and former U.S. Secretary of Energy — about key challenges and targets that the new administration should consider to accelerate significant progress in these areas.
Q: What are your initial thoughts on what the top priority items should be for the Biden-Harris administration?
A: First of all, I think we should start off by saying that it’s pretty clear that the president is going to move out smartly on energy and climate. His appointments speak volumes, starting out with John Kerry in this new international envoy position; with Gina McCarthy; Brian Deese in the White House; Jennifer Granholm as the secretary of energy, who, as the governor of Michigan, did a lot with renewables and transportation; and the choice of Janet Yellen in the treasury with her well-known commitment to carbon emissions pricing.
It’s pretty convincing that the Biden-Harris Administration is in fact going to carry through with their “whole of government” approach to addressing climate. Now, in terms of priorities going forward, I think it’s important to distinguish between the types of actions that he can take. Clearly, there will be a large package of executive actions that can be taken without Congress.
Frankly, some of those will be reversing what Trump rolled back. Some examples of rollback to Obama-Biden rules, possibly further strengthened under Biden-Harris, could include Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for auto efficiency and methane emissions rules.
There will also be a restart of some major Obama-Biden activities. One that I was very close to while energy secretary was energy efficiency standards. During the Obama period, the Department of Energy issued more than 50 energy-efficiency standards. We’re talking more than half a trillion dollars of consumer savings and about two to three gigatons of CO2 avoided cumulatively to 2030. You’re going to see that come out like gangbusters, maybe even more aggressive than when we were in the Obama administration.
Rejoining the Paris Agreement is a no-brainer. Getting in as a notification on Day One, and then 30 days later we’re in. Now, what do you do with it? The very early announcement of John Kerry’s position as international climate envoy was a clear statement that we don’t want to just rejoin Paris, we want to re-establish a leadership position. Other countries haven’t taken a four-year vacation on this. They’ve been working hard at it. We have to earn our place back at the table. A major test in the next few months will be formulation of a much more aggressive nationally determined contribution for 2030 than that adopted for 2025 at the Paris climate meeting just over five years ago, while also describing a domestic program that can credibly reach the goal. It will be tough to thread this needle.
These are only a few highlights of things that will be reestablished, but there will also be some new elements as well. For example, I believe that he will order all the financial regulatory agencies to put corporate climate risk disclosures very high on the agenda, reinforcing what the private banks and investors do in terms of the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement. It’s going to be a major executive package that the administration can put in place.
Q: There have been a lot of interesting climate and energy experiments and aggressive programs at the state and regional levels around the country. What lessons can be learned from these examples and how can we take national legislative action that leverages what we have already learned?
A: Despite the newfound Democratic majority in the Senate, I don’t think we should be fooled into thinking that it’s going to be easy to get comprehensive legislation immediately. Frankly, there’s a lot of work to do in bringing the Democrats together in terms of what kinds of programs are actually needed. If we assume, and I do assume, that once again we will not have comprehensive legislation on matters such as significant carbon emissions pricing anytime soon, state and city leadership will continue to be very important because in these past few years, clearly states and cities have been the ones leading the charge, often with opposition of the federal government.
Moving forward, there will be synergy between what the states and cities and the administration want to do. One should not underestimate how that will free up a lot of state and city initiatives on the path to the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow in late 2021, reinforcing a magic year of repositioning America on climate and clean energy. For example, I’m expecting that the considerable number of net-zero declarations by cities and states (and companies too) will only be strengthened. Clearly, national comprehensive legislation is desired and will eventually be very important, but we’ve always emphasized that, even with national legislation, we should never lose sight of the fact that low-carbon solutions are fundamentally regional in nature. This is a key direction that the Biden-Harris administration can go in even without comprehensive legislation. Facilitating and encouraging these kinds of regionally focused solutions is the only way we’re going to reach the net-zero objective.
Going back to Congress, there are two areas that I feel are ripe for congressional bipartisan action: innovation and infrastructure. Innovation is where the Congress in the last four years has shown promising bipartisan support. This is the decade where we need supercharged innovation because if we don’t get that addressed in this decade, we’re not going to have the scale potential in the 2030s and ’40s that we’re going to need for the mid-century net-zero goal.
Congress knows that they cannot kick the can down the road any further on infrastructure. The money has to be found and that will include as an important subset, energy infrastructure. That will obviously include the electricity system, for example, but it will also include things such as the infrastructure that is needed for large-scale carbon management and the infrastructure for large-scale, multi-sectoral hydrogen development. With innovation and infrastructure, I do believe that we’ll be able to garner strong bipartisan support. Clearly once we get into more difficult areas, that may take more time.
Q: Many argue that clean power generation alone will not be enough to address the climate and energy crisis alone and that carbon removal technologies will prove to be essential get us there. This begs the question about what the Biden-Harris administration might do to address these areas. How could they incentivize carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) technology or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to help make it more affordable and appealing for large scale implementation?
A: Some people argue against admitting that CDR should be part of the solution because it is interpreted as giving more life to fossil fuels. I think that’s completely the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is to recognize net-zero economy-wide emissions as just one milestone on the way to net-negative emissions, and it’s a tautology that you can’t do net-negative if you don’t have negative carbon technologies. The more that one can develop, demonstrate and deploy these technologies now, the more we’re getting a leg up to the place where we really want to go in the future, and of course at the same time, it’s going to help us with the mitigation challenge along the path to net-zero.
We’ve been advancing quite strenuously this carbon dioxide removal agenda, and it’s getting a lot of traction. The energy bill that was attached to the Omnibus Appropriations Bill and signed by the former president on Dec. 21, 2020 provided a lot of support for these technologies. This includes the support of a broad research portfolio on the topic and also requires a cross-administration CDR committee. The energy bill also authorized six big CCUS demonstration projects. Moving those forward will be very important, but where I think the government has to come in in a new way is to also be looking at the simultaneous build-up of the infrastructure to service these areas.
In this decade, we could start with a set of discrete hubs to advance the infrastructure of CCUS, CDR, and hydrogen, and the federal government can play a huge role in getting that to happen in collaboration with cities, states, and regions nationwide. More

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A new study from researchers at MIT uncovers the kinds of infrastructure improvements that would make the biggest difference in increasing the number of electric cars on the road, a key step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.
The researchers found that installing charging stations on residential streets, rather than just in central locations such as shopping malls, could have an outsized benefit. They also found that adding on high-speed charging stations along highways and making supplementary vehicles more easily available to people who need to travel beyond the single-charge range of their electric vehicles could greatly increase the vehicle electrification potential.
The findings are reported today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by MIT associate professor of energy studies Jessika Trancik, graduate student Wei Wei, postdoc Sankaran Ramakrishnan, and former doctoral student Zachary Needell SM ’15, PhD ’18.
The researchers developed a new methodology to identify charging solutions that would conveniently fit into people’s daily activities. They used data collected from GPS tracking devices in cars, as well as survey results about people’s daily driving habits and needs, including detailed data from the Seattle area and more general data from the U.S. as a whole. Greatly increasing the penetration of electric cars into the personal vehicle fleet is a central feature of climate mitigation policies at local, state, and federal levels, Trancik says. A goal of this study was “to better understand how to make these plans for rapid vehicle electrification a reality,” she adds.
In deciding how to prioritize different kinds of improvements in vehicle charging infrastructure, she says, “the approach that we took methodologically was to emphasize building a better understanding of people’s detailed energy consuming behavior, throughout the day and year.”
To do that, “we examine how different people are moving from location to location throughout the day, and where they are stopping,” she says. “And from there we’re able to look at when and where they would be able to charge without interrupting their daily travel activities.”
The team looked at both regular daily activities and the variations that occur over the course of a year. “The longitudinal view is important for capturing the different kinds of trips that a driver makes over time, so that we can determine the kinds of charging infrastructure needed to support vehicle electrification,” Wei says. 
While the vast majority of people’s daily driving needs can be met by the range provided by existing lower-cost electric cars, as Trancik and her colleagues have reported, there are typically a few times when people need to drive much farther. Or, they may need to make more short trips than usual in a day, with little time to stop and recharge. These “high-energy days,” as the researchers call them, when drivers are consuming more than the usual amount of energy for their transportation needs, may only happen a handful of times per year, but they can be the deciding factor in people’s decision making about whether to go electric.
Even though battery technology is steadily improving and extending the maximum range of electric cars, that alone will not be enough to meet all drivers’ needs and achieve rapid emissions reductions. So, addressing the range issue through infrastructure is essential, Trancik says. The highest-capacity batteries tend to be the most expensive, and are not affordable to many, she points out, so getting infrastructure right is also important from an equity perspective.
Being strategic in placing infrastructure where it can be most convenient and effective — and making drivers aware of it so they can easily envision where and when they will charge — could make a huge difference, Trancik says.
“There are various ways to incentivize the expansion of such charging infrastructures,” she says. “There’s a role for policymakers at the federal level, for example, for incentives to encourage private sector competition in this space, and demonstration sites for testing out, through public-private partnerships, the rapid expansion of the charging infrastructure.” State and local governments can also play an important part in driving innovation by businesses, she says, and a number of them have already signaled their support for vehicle electrification.
Providing easy access to alternative transportation for those high-energy days could also play a role, the study found. Vehicle companies may even find it advantageous to provide or partner with convenient rental services to help drive their electric car sales.
In their analysis of driving habits in Seattle, for example, the team found that the impact of either adding highway fast-charging stations or increasing availability of supplementary long-range vehicles for up to four days a year meant that the number of homes that could meet their driving needs with a lower cost electric vehicle increased from 10 percent to 40 percent. This number rose to above 90 percent of households when fast-charging stations, workplace charging, overnight public charging, and up to 10 days of access to supplementary vehicles were all available. Importantly, charging options at residential locations (on or off-street) is key across all of these scenarios.
The study’s findings highlight the importance of making overnight charging capabilities available to more people. While those who have their own garages or off-street parking can often already easily charge their cars at home, many people do not have that option and use public parking. “It’s really important to provide access — reliable, predictable access — to charging for people, wherever they park for longer periods of time near home, often overnight,” Trancik says.
That includes locations such as hotels as well as residential neighborhoods, she says. “I think it’s so critical to emphasize these high-impact approaches, such as figuring out ways to do that on public streets, rather than haphazardly putting a charger at the grocery store or at the mall or any other public location.” Not that those aren’t also useful, she says, but public planning should be aiming to expand accessibility to a greater part of the population. Being strategic about infrastructure expansion will continue to be important even as fast chargers fall in cost and new designs begin to allow for more rapid charging, she adds.
Being strategic in placing infrastructure where it can be most convenient and effective could make a huge difference in the wider adoption of clean vehicles, Trancik says. Courtesy of Trancik Lab
The study should help to provide some guidance to policymakers at all levels who are looking for ways to facilitate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, since the transportation sector accounts for about a third of those emissions overall. “If you have limited funds, which you typically always do, then it’s just really important to prioritize,” Trancik says, noting that this study could indicate the areas that could provide the greatest return for those investments. The high-impact charging solutions they identify can be mixed and matched across different cities, towns, and regions, the reseachers note in their paper.
The researchers’ approach to analyzing high-resolution, real-world driving patterns is “valuable, enabling several opportunities for further research,” says Lynette Cheah, an associate professor of engineering systems and design at Singapore University of Technology and Design, who was not associated with this work. “Real-world driving data can not only guide infrastructure and policy planning, but also optimal EV charging management and vehicle purchasing and usage decisions. … This can provide greater confidence to drivers about the feasibility and operational implications of switching to EVs.”
The study was supported by the European Regional Development Fund, the Lisbon Portugal Regional Development Program, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and the U.S. Department of Energy. More