Doctoral prize of the European Physical Society awarded to Wei Zhang

IPP postdoc honoured for outstanding doctoral thesis

April 20, 2018

IPP postdoc Dr. Wei Zhang is one of the four prizewinners honoured by the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS) for the outstanding quality of their doctoral theses with the PhD Research Award 2018.


Wei Zhang, born 1988 in China, studied Applied Physics at Hunan University in Changsha and then Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei. He started his doctoral thesis, Plasma Edge Modeling with ICRF Coupling, in 2014 at the University of Ghent in Belgium, where IPP’s Professor Dr. Jean-Marie Noterdaeme was one of his supervisors. Wei Zhang’s research was concerned with investigating how radiowaves fed into the plasma influence the plasma edge – much of this having been done at IPP in Garching. The most efficient possible coupling of the radiowaves and their impact on the plasmas of the ASDEX Upgrade and JET fusion devices were calculated in numerical simulations the results of which he extrapolated to the conditions prevailing in ITER and a demonstration power plant. He was awarded his PhD in 2017.

His distinction, endowed with one thousand euros, is to be presented in early July at this year’s EPS Conference on Plasma Physics in Prague, at which each of the prizewinners is to present a talk.

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