Simon Bott-Suzuki, Ph.D.

Bio-sketch

​

Simon Bott-Suzuki is an experimental plasma physicist with 20 years experience in academic research. He received the MPhys(ChemPhys) and Ph.D. degrees from Sheffield University, UK in 1999 and 2003 respectively. His Ph.D. thesis work investigated low density deuterium discharges for UV lighting applications. In 2003, he moved to the Plasma Physics Group at Imperial College London to research pulsed-power driven exploding wire plasmas for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). He joined the Center for Energy Research at UCSD in December 2006, where he is presently an Associate Research Scientist and leads the Pulsed Plasma Physics group. Dr Bott-Suzuki is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Applied & Engineering Physics Department at Cornell University.

​

Dr Bott-Suzuki has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, served as Chair for international conferences, and as Principle Investigator for a number of federal grants, primarily through the US Dept of Energy. He collaborates with academic research groups both in the US and internationally, with several national laboratories as well as private companies. His current research centers around the investigation of plasmas generated using high currents (kilo-amperes to mega-amperes) and accelerated by self-generated magnetic fields. Such systems are interesting for a wide range of basic plasma physics and High Energy Density (HED) physics topics, including the development of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE), and experimentally simulating astrophysical phenomena in the laboratory. Detailed quantitative diagnosis of plasma is required to allow accurate comparison to numerical studies and support the design of new experiments and the scaling of performance in to new regimes.