Professor Cary Forest

Biographical Sketch

Prof. Cary B Forestreceived a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1986 in the Applied Math, Engineering and Physics program.   He received a Magnetic Fusion Energy Science Fellowship from the DoE to attend graduate school at Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in 1992 in the  Astrophysical Sciences department. His thesis, supervised by Dr. Masayuki Ono at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, received the   Simon Ramo Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Plasma Physics from the APS. In the course of his thesis work he invented and demonstrated a non-inductive method of tokamak formation based upon the bootstrap current and helped start the US spherical tokamak program. After graduate school he spent 5 years working at General Atomics as a Scientist where his work focused on advanced tokamaks and included studies of plasma resistivity, non-inductive current drive, rf heating of plasmas and MHD instabilities in tokamak plasmas (at the time GA operated the largest US tokamak research program).  The analysis technique Forest developed during this time for measuring the non-inductive currents driven in tokamaks has since been implemented in most of the world’s large tokamaks and played a central role in validating the heating and current drive models being used to predict their behavior on Iter. At the UW, Forest has received the Romnes Fellowship, the Vilas Associate Award, the Kellett Mid Career Award and most recently a WARF Named Professorship.  Nationally, he is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship, and a Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany (2005)), and is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He has served as Director of the NSF Physics Frontier Center for Magnetic Self-Organization and currently serves as the Director of the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory and overseas its operations as a DoE collaborative user facility.  He has served and numerous study committees of the National Academies of Science and has Chaired program advisory committees at MIT and Princeton. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has Chaired the the Division of Plasma Physics and also served a an APS Counselor. 

Areas of Technical Specialization