Assistant Professor Livia Casali served as the scientific program committee chair for the 2026 Sherwood Fusion Theory Conference, which took place April 27-29 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The annual international conference is organized for educational and scientific purposes, specifically to communicate the recent results in the physics of controlled fusion energy. This year’s meeting drew world-leading experts in the field from several countries, sharing advancements in theory, computation, AI and machine learning, and other techniques.
Casali’s research group from the university participated in the conference, presenting the group’s research and advancements with three talks and one poster presentation by student Tate Taczak, who was awarded the Bill Dorland Award for his work on “SOLPS-ITER and BOUT++ Iterative Coupling (SIBIL) to self-consistently inform 2D anomalous diffusion coefficients.”
Sherwood participants will have the opportunity to publish their work in the journal Physics of Plasmas Special Collection Sherwood 2026. Casali will serve as a guest co-editor for the journal issue with Xianzhu Tang, a plasma physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Evdokiya Kostadinova, an assistant professor of physics at Auburn University.
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey ([email protected])