NSE Comm Fellow Leigh Ann Kesler in the MIT News
Graduate student Leigh Ann Kesler is pursuing her two great interests: fusion science and rock climbing. One day she finds herself scrambling up bare rock faces to view grand vistas of mountains and valleys carved by glaciers, the next she is in the laboratory, exploring minute changes in the depth of materials being eroded by fusion forces.
Kesler studies at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), and dates her interest in fusion back to an 11th-grade persuasive writing assignment. Inspired in part by her father’s interest in the potential of nuclear energy, she decided to investigate fusion. Searching for the topic at the library in her Fisher, Illinois, high school, she found just one 1970s-vintage book on the topic, but its description of a magnetic fusion device called a tokamak was compelling enough to hook her for good. …click to continue reading at MIT News