First FuseNet Master Thesis Prize awarded: Four of the five winners cooperated with IPP

Collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is open to fusion Master’s students from all EU universities

This year, for the first time, the European Fusion Education Network (FuseNet) of the European Union has awarded five students for their outstanding Master's theses on the research field of fusion. Four of the Master Thesis Prize winners cooperated with the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), i.e. they worked experimentally or theoretically with data from the large-scale experiments ASDEX Upgrade and Wendelstein 7-X. "The IPP is basically open to collaborating with Master's students from all EU universities. And the high quality of the work proves that such cooperation is worthwhile for the students," says Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Wolfrum from IPP, who is also a member of the Academic Council of FuseNet. Applicants who had completed their Master's thesis at a university in the EU, Switzerland or the UK were eligible. The awards were presented at the 48th EPS Conference on Plasma Physics Online (27.6.–1.7.). All award winners will receive funding from FuseNet, allowing them to attend a scientific conference of their choice this year.

The award winners (bold: with IPP cooperation):

• Lidija Radovanovic (TU Wien): Ballooning Stability Analysis of the ASDEX-Upgrade small-ELM regime
• Verena Mitterauer (TU München): Non-linear simulations of the penetration of error fields into tokamak plasmas
• Thilo Romba (TU Eindhoven): Validation of the W7-X CXRS for impurity density profiles
• Jan Čečrdle (TU Prague): Simulation of behavior of liquid metal divertor heat shield on tokamak COMPASS Upgrade
• Timo Thun (RWTH Aachen): Reinforcement Learning for Wendelstein 7-X Divertor heat load control