Robert W. Conn
University of California, San Diego
Seminar Information
Having worked in the fusion energy field since 1970, I will provide an assessment of the prospects of fusion energy today. Until about a decade ago, my assessment was that fusion energy is a long way off - and might always be. Advances over the past decade in the physics of magnetically confined plasma, the achievements in inertial confinement fusion using lasers, and breakthroughs in the engineering of high temperature superconducting magnets have changed the outlook. Alongside these scientific and engineering advances has come private investments of more than $6 billion in fusion energy startups, a most remarkable and surprising development. Starting from the basics of what fusion is, I will review the progress in laser fusion and magnetic plasma confinement science, the key breakthrough technology of high temperature superconducting magnets that changes the prospects for a practical tokamak magnetic fusion reactor, and the shift from a solely government funded program to one of balanced funding between government and the private sector. All this will lead to my present assessment of how close we are to practical fusion energy. It may well be closer than I thought just a decade ago.
Dr. Robert Conn is the W.J. Zable Professor and Dean of Engineering, Emeritus, of the Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego. He is also President and CEO, Emeritus, of the Kavli Foundation, having retired at the end of 2020. He is presently Distinguished Policy Fellow at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. His research contributions in the fields of plasma and fusion engineering, higher education, science and technology policy, and science philanthropy have in ways transformed these areas. He pioneered the study of fusion engineering and reactor design in the 1970’s and was for three decades the leading researcher across the many disciplines making up this field. As Dean of Engineering, he led the Jacobs School during its unprecedented growth in reputation and scale, leading to its rise in rankings from 44 in 1993 to 11 in 2003. He led the California Engineering Initiative in 1997 to increase engineering by 30% across the entire UC System over five years, enabled by an additional $400 million in State funding. And he organized in 2000 the UCSD campus effort that led to the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, today the Qualcomm Institute. As Kavli Foundation president, he enabled convenings beginning in 2011 of nanoscientists and neuroscientists on Mapping the Functioning Brain that led directly to the first U.S. Grand Challenge Problem of the 21st Century, the US BRAIN Initiative, announced by President Obama in April 2013. His founding vision for the Science Philanthropy Alliance (SPA) in 2012 led to changing the landscape of science, engineering and technology philanthropy. He has been an engaged voice in the country’s science, technology, and engineering policy arena for close to 50 years.
Among his many honors and awards are the Outstanding Research Achievement Award, American Nuclear Society (1979); the Earnest O. Lawrence Memorial Award (1984); the Distinguished Associate Award, Department of Energy (1996); the Distinguished Alumni Award, Caltech (1998); the Parker Medal, Yale University (2017); the Revelle Medal, UC San Diego (2018), the Shokuman Award, the University of Tokyo, 2020; and the Gordon and Llura Lund Leadership Award, Research!America (2024). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (elected in 1987) and received in 2023 the Academy’s rarest and oldest award, the Simon Ramo Founders Award. Its citation reads: “For shaping national science and technology policy through leadership in academia, business, and philanthropy and for seminal contributions to fusion engineering.” Dr. Conn received his BS in chemical engineering from the Pratt Institute (1964) and both his MS in mechanical engineering (1965) and his Ph.D. in engineering science (1968) from the California Institute of Technology.