Once Katie Butler heard that the International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology (ISFNT) was being hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Knoxville this year, she was quick to offer her assistance to help organize the event.
Butler, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, served on several conference planning committees when she was pursuing her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois. After arriving at the University of Tennessee, she helped plan the American Nuclear Society (ANS) Student Conference hosted in Knoxville in 2023.
Butler’s offer to join the local ISFNT organizing committee was welcomed by everyone involved. She served as the finance chair for the successful event, which was held in November at the Knoxville Convention Center.
“I was able to pull from some of my previous experience with conferences and figure out what sort of things we would need to budget for,” Butler said. “It just gave us a starting off point. There were some other people working on getting sponsorship money, so I was able to figure out roughly how much of that we might need as well.”
Roughly 400 people from around the world attended ISFNT this year to present research in fusion technology and network. Along with her committee responsibilities, Butler also presented her research on plasma material interactions, specifically for RF antennas.
“The plasma physics is a little bit different on the antenna surface versus the rest of the tokamak,” Butler said. “Plasma-material interactions (PMI) is a really big area of interest in fusion. But I stepped a little bit to the side, and I’m doing that in the RF aspect.”
First-class Representation
At the closing ceremony for ISFNT, Butler earned praise from Monica Gehrig, the local organizing committee chair and a research and development blanket engineer at ORNL.
“Katie was an excellent representative of our department, and I heard nothing but praise and gratitude from all the organizers for all the work she did to help make the event happen and how she went above and beyond at every opportunity,” said NE Professor and Zinkle Fellow David Donovan, who is Butler’s PhD advisor. “This conference provided great visibility for the University of Tennessee and Knoxville and helped highlight East Tennessee’s strengths in nuclear technology.”
Butler was happy to have played a part in hosting ISFNT. She was able to interact with higher-level researchers and expand her own coordinating capabilities to use for future conferences.
“Things get really chaotic in the moment. But taking a step back and talking to some of the other people who were at conference—they told me it was a really great conference,” Butler said. “That makes me feel good to know they enjoyed the experience and felt it was run very well.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)