Associate Vice President for Research Administration

Biography

Anne E. White is the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering and associate vice president for research administration at MIT. Her research focuses on magnetic fusion energy and has contributed to the understanding of turbulent transport in magnetically confined fusion plasmas via diagnostic development, novel experimentation, and validation of nonlinear gyrokinetic codes. Her group’s research is dedicated to the demonstration of nuclear fusion as an important and practical part of the world’s emerging sustainable energy future.

As associate vice president for research administration at MIT, White advises the vice president for research and oversees a number of central administrative teams that engage with MIT researchers and federal, industrial, and other sponsors to help advance MIT research from idea to impact. Research Administration Services, Research Administration Systems and Support, Cost Analysis, Research Development, and the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT)—which comprises the Technology Licensing Office, Corporate Relations, and OSATT Core—report to her.

White received her PhD in physics at UCLA and performed research at the Electric Tokamak at UCLA, the National Spherical Torus Experiment at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics before joining MIT as a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). White's research has contributed to diagnostic development, turbulence and transport physics, and transport model validation on four tokamaks: Alcator C-Mod, ASDEX Upgrade, DIII-D, and National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade. At MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), White served as assistant division head for magnetic fusion energy collaborations and ran the Gyrokinetic Simulation Working Group and the Alcator C-Mod Transport Group. As associate director for education and outreach at PSFC, she also oversaw the center’s educational and K–12 outreach activities. She served as NSE department head from 2019 to 2023 and co-chaired the MIT Climate Nucleus from 2021 to 2024.

She currently serves on the MIT Gift Policy Committee and the MIT Faculty Policy Committee. In the role of associate vice president for research administration, she is a member of Academic Council, Dean’s Group, and the Academic Appointments Subgroup, serves ex officio on the Gift Acceptance Committee and the Committee on Intellectual Property, and convenes a number of working groups in support of research administration operations and strategy at MIT.

She currently chairs the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC), the federal advisory board to the director of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and helped write “Transformative Enabling Capabilities for Efficient Advance Toward Fusion Energy” (2018) and “Powering the Future: Fusion and Plasmas” (2021), two of several FESAC reports that defined the role of fusion as a transformative technology and laid out strategic actions and recommendations for the future of the U.S. fusion program. White has given numerous invited talks and seminars about fusion energy and plasma physics. In 2018, White led a team in NSE to develop a free MITx MOOC for global high school-level learners focused on nuclear science and engineering, and in 2022, White was one of a select group invited to speak at the White House summit, “Developing a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy.” White was featured in WIRED’s “5 Levels” video series in 2023, explaining nuclear fusion to a popular audience.

She is a member of AAAS, the American Nuclear Society, and the American Physical Society (APS) and a fellow of the APS’s Division of Plasma Physics.