Associate Vice President for Research Administration

Biography

Anne E. White is the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering at MIT. She 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 the Institute as a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). White has served on several department and Institute-wide committees and currently co-chairs the MIT Climate Nucleus, charged with managing and implementing the Institute’s new climate action plan; she also serves on the MIT Gift Policy Committee and is the NSE ABET coordinator. 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.

White's research focuses on magnetic fusion energy (MFE). Her work has included contributions 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, White served as assistant division head for MFE collaborations and ran the Gyrokinetic Simulation Working Group and the Alcator C-Mod Transport Group. She currently serves as chair of the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC), the federal advisory board to the director of the US 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), the FESAC reports that define the role of fusion as a transformative technology and lay out strategic actions and recommendations for the future of the US fusion program. White has given numerous invited talks and seminars about fusion energy and plasma physics and, in 2022, was one of a select group invited to speak at the White House summit, Developing a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy.