Short Course Instructors Biographies

Superconducting Magnet Design

Paolo Ferracin is currently a staff scientist in the Superconducting Magnets and Cryostats Group at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. After graduating in Nuclear Engineering at the Politecnico of Torino, Italy in 1998, he joined the CERN Main Magnet and Superconductors Group as a PhD Student to work on the mechanics and magnetics of the main superconducting dipole magnets for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In May 2002, he started working in the Superconducting Magnet Program  of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), first as a Physicist Postdoctoral Fellow and then as a Staff Scientist, on the development of Nb3Sn dipoles and quadrupoles for the next generation particle accelerators. In 2011, he re-joined the Superconducting Magnets Group at CERN. For the past 15 years, he has conducted research in the area of applied superconductivity and superconducting magnet technology for particle accelerators.

Tim Havens is currently Electromagnetic and System Engineering manager at GE Healthcare in Florence, South Carolina. He has more than 20 years of experience designing and manufacturing superconducting MRI magnets. He has more than 40 patents for MRI systems, including patents for the first 1.0T mobile MRI magnet to be transported at field, and the first conduction cooled 0.5 T production MRI magnet for interventional use. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Physics from The College of William and Mary in Virginia and his BS in Physics from Eckerd College in Florida.

Herman ten Kate, PhD (CERN, University of Twente)

Joseph Minervini is Division Head for Technology and Engineering in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Senior Research Engineer in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He has experience and research interests in a wide variety of large-scale applications of superconductors including for fusion energy, magnetic levitation, energy storage, power generation, and transmission, magnetic separation, as well as medical applications. Dr. Minervini holds a B.S. Engineering degree from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alfredo Portone graduated with honours in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Bologna in 1987. In 1992 and 1994 he received, respectively, a Master Of Science (MSc) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Imperial College (London, UK). From 1989 he worked at the ITER project, and from 1993 to 2000 he joined the ITER Joint Central Team at Naka (Japan) for the ITER Engineering Design Activity. From 2000 until 2007 he coordinated R & D activities within the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) Team in various areas of science and technology, especially in engineering and control of fusion plasmas, superconducting magnets and computational models for engineering. From 2005 until 2011 he has been Project Leader for the design and manufacturing of the European DIPOle (EDIPO) superconducting magnet, presently under commissioning at CRPP. Since 2008 he is part of the ITER European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy in Barcelona as Head of the Engineering Analysis group for the ITER project.

 

Superconducting Power Devices 

Phillipe Masson, PhD (University of Houston)

Jean Leveque (Universite de Lorraine)

Lukas Graber received his PhD degree from ETH Zurich in 2010 for his research in SF6 leakage detection for gas insulated switchgear. Before his PhD he was with Technocon AG, developing power electronics for rail and wind power applications. Currently, he is a research faculty at the Center for Advanced Power Systems (CAPS), Florida State University, working in the fields of cryogenic dielectrics and grounding of shipboard power systems. He is leading the High Voltage Laboratory at CAPS. Most recently he has been involved in the dielectric design of a 30 m long helium gas cooled superconducting power cable at CAPS. Dr. Graber is senior member of IEEE, member of the Cryogenic Society of America (CSA), member of Electrosuisse, and contributes to the re-write of IEEE 45 “Recommended Practice for Electric Installations on Shipboard”.

Tim Coombs (Cambridge University)

 

Superconducting Electronics

Alan M. Kadin (IEEE M’87–SM’14) received the B.A. in physics from Princeton University in 1974, and the M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1975 and 1979, with a thesis on superconducting devices. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Stony Brook University, New York from 1979-1981 and at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis from 1981-1983.  He was then a Research Scientist at Energy Conversion Devices and its subsidiary Ovonic Synthetic Materials Company, in Troy, Michigan, from 1983-1987.  He then served as an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester (New York) from 1987-2000. From 2000-2005 he was a Senior Scientist at Hypres, Inc., Elmsford, NY.  Since 2005 Dr. Kadin has been a Technical Consultant based in Princeton Junction, New Jersey. Concurrently in 2012 he was an Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ. He is the author of the textbook Introduction to Superconducting Circ its (Wiley, New York, 1999), and over 100 publications and 10 patents. Dr. Kadin is a longtime specialist in superconducting circuits, devices, and materials, with a continuing interest in the foundations of physical theories.  He is a member of the American Physical Society.  He is currently participating in the IEEE Rebooting Computing Working Group.

Deepnarayan Gupta is currently the Executive Vice President in charge of the RF Circuits and Systems business division of HYPRES. With over 20 years of experience, Dr. Deepnarayan Gupta is a technology pioneer in the area of digital-RF technology that encompasses ultrafast digital, high-quality analog, and high-performance mixed-signal electronics. He has a keen interest in developing the hybrid-temperature heterogeneous-technology (HTHT) systems concept that combines the strengths of various electronic and photonic technologies to solve difficult technical problems. Dr. Gupta served in various capacities, including VP R&D (2003-2012), since joining HYPRES in 1997. Prior to joining HYPRES, Dr. Gupta was a post-doctoral research affiliate at Stanford University (1995-1997), working on hybrid superconductor-semiconductor electronics. He earned B. Tech (Hons.) in Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering (1990) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India. He is a senior member of the IEEE and holds 34 U.S. patents. He serves on the boards of the Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC) and the United States Committee for Superconductor Electronics, Inc., and represents the IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS) on the IEEE Council on Superconductivity.

 

Superconducting Quantum Computation

Fred Wellstood is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a member of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials and the Joint Quantum Institute. His research interests include SQUIDs, magnetic imaging, excess noise, two-level systems, and superconducting qubits.

Ben Palmer, PhD  (Laboratory for Physical Science)

Steven M. Anlage is a Professor of Physics and faculty affiliate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his B.S. degree in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1988, respectively. His post-doctoral work with the Beasley-Geballe-Kapitulnik group at Stanford University (1987 – 1990) concentrated on high frequency properties of high temperature superconductors. In 1990 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics in the Center for Superconductivity Research at the University of Maryland, then (1997) Associate Professor, and finally (2002) Full Professor of Physics. He was the interim Director of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials (2007-2009), and is a member of the Maryland NanoCenter. In 2011 he was appointed a Research Professor at the DFG-Center for Functional Nanostructures at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
His research in high frequency superconductivity has addressed questions of the pairing state symmetry of the cuprate superconductors, the dynamics of conductivity fluctuations and vortices, and microwave applications such as superconducting negative index of refraction metamaterials. He has also developed and patented a near-field scanning microwave microscope for quantitative local measurements of electronic materials (dielectrics, semiconductors, metals, and superconductors) down to nm length scales. Prof. Anlage also performs microwave analog experiments of the Schrödinger equation to test fundamental theories of quantum chaos. As part of this work he has developed a statistical prediction model for effects of high-power microwave signals on electronics. He is also active in the emerging field of time-reversed electromagnetics.
Dr. Anlage is a member of the American Physical Society, the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, and the Materials Research Society. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and DoD, and he is an active consultant to the US Government. He was a member of the NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of Maryland from 1995-2005.

 

Cryogenic Systems Engineering with Cryocoolers

Melora Larson, PhD  (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

 

Effective Technical Presentations & Papers Educational Short Course

Julia M. Williams, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Research, Planning, and Assessment at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her experience in undergraduate teaching began in 1985 when she taught English Composition at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, then continued through her graduate years at Emory University, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Throughout her career at Rose-Hulman, she has blended her work in the classroom with work in assessment. She was the founder of the Program in Technical Communication at Rose-Hulman, a campus-wide effort to improve students’ written and oral communication skills in a variety of courses.  In 1995 she joined the effort to create and implement the RosE Portfolio System, an online portfolio assessment tool that is still in use today as the RosEvaluation Tool.  Evidence of student learning from the RosEvaluation is used by the Institute and academic programs to measure student learning and to direct curriculum improvements.  She has been active in the use and assessment of tablet PCs in the classroom, and she has collaborated with faculty and staff in projects such as the Rose-Hulman Leadership Advancement Program and the national RosEvaluation Conference. Williams’s publications on assessment, engineering and professional communication, and tablet PCs have appeared in the Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, and The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technologies in the Classroom, among others.  She is the recipient of the 2010 Sterling Olmsted Award (ASEE Liberal Education Division), the 2007 Council for Higher Education Accreditation Award, 2007 HP Technology for Teaching Award, and the 2005 Microsoft Research Award.  She is also the recipient of the 2008 Rose-Hulman Board of Trustees Outstanding Scholar Award and the 2004 Humanities and Social Sciences Department Outstanding Researcher Award. Dr. Williams is President of the IEEE Professional Communications Society.