David P. Schissel Email & Phone Number

Greater San Diego Area

Insuring that the computing infrastructure remains capable of supporting the scientific missions of the DIII-D National Fusion Facility and its diverse scientific staff composed of over 500 researchers from 90 institutions worldwide. This infrastructure includes the data acquisition, instrumentation, control systems, data analysis, high performance computing, and scientific visualization unique to DIII-D. In addition, responsible for the underlying Information Technology (IT) for DIII-D and the Inertial Fusion Division encompassing user support services, networking, and data storage. Finally, this role includes creating and leading innovative research projects for DOE/ASCR and DOE/OFES.

San Diego, Ca

Director of the Nirvana SRB division of General Atomics that develops and installs the commercial software package SRB providing management of large-scale data federations (Big Data).

San Diego, Ca

Responsible for leading innovative work on Tiled Display walls including the deployment for DOD of a unique mobile system for security and surveillance that includes GPU-based image analysis, 11 Mpixel cameras, and multisensor cross-cueing.

San Diego, Ca

Responsible for planning and coordinating the necessary computer hardware/software resources to support the scientific staff's data analysis and remote collaboration requirements. This coordination involves a geographically diverse scientific staff composed of over 500 researchers from 90 institutions worldwide. Responsible for creating and leading innovative research projects for DOE/ASCR and DOE/OFES.

San Diego, Ca

Designed and led an experiment to use Electron Cyclotron Heating that tested theory based energy transport models with significantly finer granularity than was previously possible.

San Diego, Ca

Member of the international physics design team for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) under the auspices of the IAEA; Initiated experiments with neutral beam heating that demonstrated the importance of off–diagonal terms in the plasma energy transport matrix; designed innovative experiments that satisfied USDOE milestones by independently determining the importance of density and temperature on plasma energy transport.

San Diego, Ca

Managed an international collaborative effort between the EURATOM and the USDOE to study the physics of tokamak energy confinement including the experimental design, data analysis, and results presentation to the international community; consulted in Japan, Russia, and at LLNL on the detection of absolute plasma Bremsstrahlung emission.

San Diego, Ca

Designed, constructed, installed, and calibrated a visible Bremsstrahlung emission diagnostic to determine plasma cleanliness and a visible light emission diagnostic to measure plasma-wall interactions; created and implemented experimental proposals to study plasma energy transport and confinement; designed and implemented a multi-user relational database for complex physics data analysis.

San Diego, Ca

Designed, calibrated, and performed data analysis on a plasma neutron detection system to routinely determine ion temperature; responsible for conducting experiments to investigate energy transport properties of plasma discharges fueled by frozen hydrogen pellet injection; performed computer simulations of fast ion orbits in magnetized plasmas to determine neutral particle emission spectrum.

Cadarache, France

Organized a program to investigate advanced tokamak operating scenarios through current profile modification.

Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Initiated experiments on the JET tokamak that investigated fueling of plasmas by frozen hydrogen pellet injection that included detailed studies of energy transport.

Master'S Degree, Plasma And High-Temperature Physics

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Nuclear Engineering