FPN18-54

Update on US Fusion Planning Activity

December 18, 2018

David Newman, chair of the US fusion community long-range planning activity (see FPN18-51) has issued the following update:

Dear DPP Community,

This is an update on the Long Range Strategic Planning process. Thank you for your input (nominations and recommendations) for the leadership for the community strategic planning process getting underway.

There were over 119 nominations for more than 77 separate people. The DPP selection sub-committee had to work hard to select from this excellent group.

As described in the original message soliciting recommendations and nominations, the criteria we used were first and foremost the ability to facilitate the process in an open, inclusive manner without pushing their own views. Next, we were trying to populate this group with as diverse a membership as possible. This included topical diversity, seniority diversity, institutional diversity, gender diversity, etc. Because the FESAC charge covers the entire DOE-FES portfolio, topically we tried to cover the basic portfolio areas: MFE, Basic Plasma Physics, High Energy Density, Materials and Technology and Alternate concepts.

After much deliberation and input from the community and our sister organizations ANS and IEEE, 7 excellent Co-Chairs were selected and have graciously agreed to serve in this role. For this we thank them.

The Co-Chairs are in no particular order.

Now that the FESAC charge has been released those leaders will (again with community input) choose ~20-30 organizational program committee members and will submit those names to the DPP ExComm subcommittee for ratification. We have forwarded those names already nominated for the leadership roles but not selected, to the Co-Chairs as an excellent starting point. They will likely be soliciting more community input shortly.

Once again, this is an exciting, if daunting, opportunity for us which hopefully will be regularly repeated (with a longer time frame) as we move forward into the future.

Thank you for your help with this process.

David Newman (for the selection sub-committee)
Chair of APS DPP and member of the selection subcommittee