Current Project: Measurement of fast ion losses in the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator

Alex LeViness (pronounced luh-VINE-ess) matriculated into the program with the class of 2018. She grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Dallas, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Columbus, Ohio. She attended The University of Alabama, where she majored in physics and mathematics and minored in German and Russian, as well as serving as an active member and Risk Management Chair of The Mallet Assembly.

After graduating with her Bachelor’s in 2017, she spent a year on a Fulbright fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany working on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator experiment, measuring fluxes of neutral particles in the divertor region with the H-α camera diagnostic. At Princeton, she did a first year experimental project on LTX-β followed by a second year project on stellarator optimization for fast ion confinement. For her thesis, she is designing, constructing, and implementing a scintillator fast ion loss detector (s-FILD) onto W7-X to measure fast ion losses, resolved in energy and pitch angle, and compare to predictions by Monte Carlo simulations.

During her time in Alabama, Alex was a learning assistant for AP Physics classes at a local high school, and has since traveled back to Alabama to give outreach talks at HBCUs. She is passionate about expanding STEM education in the South, particularly to minority students, and increasing the representation and visibility of women, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people in the physics community. In her free time, she likes reading and reviewing books, writing stories, petting cats, and freaking out about college football (Roll Tide).

She is always happy to talk to students who are interested in our program or in plasma physics in general. Alex can be contacted by email at [email protected]