Meet Vice Provost - Edmund "Ed" Synakowski

Dr. Synakowski serves as the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation at Stevens. In this role, he serves as the university’s chief research officer and works towards developing research strategies, cultivating research partnerships, and strengthening research and administration infrastructure to enable scaling of the Stevens research enterprise to substantially higher levels of intensity and impact. He is also professor in the Physics Department. Previously, he served in similar roles at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the University of Wyoming. His university service builds on federal experience, having served as associate director of science for fusion energy sciences in the U.S. Department of Energy from 2009-2016 where he was responsible for strategic planning, budget formulation, and project construction oversight. In this capacity, he served on the governing board of the international project ITER, aimed at demonstrating the scientific feasibility of fusion energy. He was awarded the Secretary of Energy’s Meritorious Service Award in 2017.

Before his federal service, Synakowski served as the Fusion Energy Program (FEP) Leader and as the Deputy Division Leader At-Large of the Physics Division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and as the Head of Research for the National Spherical Torus Experiment at Princeton University. He has published more than 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, receiving awards for excellence in plasma physics research from Princeton University and the American Physical Society. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Arts in physics from Johns Hopkins University, where he received the Kerr Medal for Excellence in Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the UK’s Institute of Physics.

Research interests

Dr. Synakowski’s research is in plasma physics and fusion energy. His research includes the first demonstrations of the causal role of sheared flows in a hot plasma in governing the confinement of heat and fusion fuel under fusion conditions, as well as the first measurements of helium production and transport in fusion plasmas. The research has been enabled by partnerships forged between national labs, universities, private industry, and overseas institutions.