Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Person

Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici

Expertise Control of nuclear fusion reactorsNuclear fusion/plasma physics:Tokamak scenarios and their control, current drive, profile control. Control of MHD instabilities, magnetic control of plasma equilibrium. Simulation of plasma core profile evolution, free-boundary equilibrium simulation and reconstruction. Real-time simulation and prediction.Control science: Control theory, feedback control design, observer design, (Kalman) filtering, nonlinear optimization, model-based predictive control, iterative learning control, machine-learning approaches to control. Implementation of control systems, real-time coding. Expertise Control of nuclear fusion reactorsNuclear fusion/plasma physics:Tokamak scenarios and their control, current drive, profile control. Control of MHD instabilities, magnetic control of plasma equilibrium. Simulation of plasma core profile evolution, free-boundary equilibrium simulation and reconstruction. Real-time simulation and prediction.Control science: Control theory, feedback control design, observer design, (Kalman) filtering, nonlinear optimization, model-based predictive control, iterative learning control, machine-learning approaches to control. Implementation of control systems, real-time coding. Federico Felici obtained his MSc degree cum laude in Systems & Control from TU Delft (The Netherlands) in 2005 and his PhD. studies at the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL, Switzerland in 2011. His PhD thesis focused on controlling diverse aspects of fusion plasmas using physics-based modelling approaches. As part of his thesis, he worked on control of MHD instabilities on the TCV tokamak and wrote the fast control-oriented RAPTOR code for solving plasma transport equations. His PhD thesis (available online) was awarded the EPFL doctorate award.In 2012 he moved to TU Eindhoven in The Nederlands as a postdoctoral researcher, where he was appointed as tenure track assistant professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Control Systems Technology group in 2014. He continued working on applications of control science to nuclear fusion, collaborating in particular with the ASDEX-Upgrade tokamak at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany.In 2018, he returned to EPFL as a research scientist. Here he leads research activities on advanced plasma control and supervises a number of PhD students. Among other projects, he co-leads a collaboration between EPFL and Google DeepMind on plasma control using reinforcement learning.His current research interests include all aspects of tokamak plasma control, with a strong focus on model-based approaches for practical implementation and demonstrations on existing and future devices. Also, he is the main developer of the RAPTOR code as well as a co-developer of the MEQ equilibrium code suite.Currently he is one of the EU representative to the ITPA, a member of the ITER Scientist Fellow Network in the area of control, Scientific Coordinator of EUROFusion experiments on TCV and ASDEX-Upgrade. He has published in the key journals in the field and given invited talks at major plasma physics conferences. Education PhD Plasma Physics | Thesis on physics-based plasma control. Supervisors: O. Sauter and T. Goodman 2011 – 2011 Ã‰cole Polytechnique FÃ©dÃ©rale de Lausanne (CH) MSc Systems & Control | Subspace identification of Linear Parameter Varying Systems 2005 – 2005 Delft University of Technology (NL) Directed by Prof. M. Verhaegen BSc Aerospace Engineering | - 2003 – 2003 Delft University of Technology (NL) Professionals experiences Research scientist 2018–2018 SPC-EPFLAssistant professor 2016–2018 Technische Universiteit EindhovenAssistant professor 2014–2016 Technische Universiteit EindhovenPostdoctoral researcher 2012–2014 Technische Universiteit Eindhoven Awards EPFL doctorate award Award for best EPFL PhD thesis of the year 2013 VENI grant Personal 3-year research grant from Dutch Research Council for the project "Control of plasma profiles in a fusion reactor" 2013

Official source

Courses taught by this person (1)

PHYS-748: Control and Operation of Tokamaks

This course treats the main issues in operation and control of a tokamak. Control-oriented models are derived and controllers are designed using techniques from modern control theory. Operational limits are discussed as well as state-of-the-art research qu ...

Related publications (118)

Please note that this is not a complete list of this person’s publications. It includes only semantically relevant works. For a full list, please refer to Infoscience.

People doing similar research (33)

Paolo Ricci

Paolo Ricci earned his masters degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin (Italy) in 2000. His doctoral studies were conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with focus on kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail. He spent two-and-a-half years as a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he worked on gyrokinetic simulations of the Z pinch. He joined the EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), as a EURATOM fellow in 2006, was named Tenure Track Assistant Professor in June 2010, and Associate Professor in August 2016. He is at the head of the SPC theory group. Paolo Ricci is the recipient of the 2016 Section de Physique Teaching Prize and of the 2021 Craie d'Or award from the EPFL physics bachelor students.

Christian Gabriel Theiler

Christian Theiler obtained his Master’s degree in physics from ETH Zurich in 2007 and his PhD from EPFL in 2011. He then joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate to work on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. In 2014, he returned to EPFL as a EUROfusion fellow, to join the TCV tokamak team. Two years later, he was named Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Plasma Physics at EPFL. Christian’s research focuses on tokamak boundary physics and related diagnostic techniques. He has contributed to the understanding of the formation, propagation, and control of turbulent plasma structures, called blobs, and gained new insights on the structure of transport barriers in the plasma periphery in different high-confinement regimes. His current research focuses on detachment physics and turbulence characteristics in conventional and alternative divertor magnetic geometries.

Ambrogio FASOLI was born on November 10, 1964, in Milano, Italy. After a classical high school diploma (Maturità Classica) and graduation from the University of Milano, with the degree of Dottore in Fisica, he obtained his Phd at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) with a thesis on chaos in wave-particle interactions in plasmas, which was awarded the Best EPFL Thesis prize, in 1993. He then moved to the JET Joint Undertaking, the largest worlds fusion device, near Oxford, UK, to investigate Alfvén waves and burning plasma physics. In 1995-1996 he took a sabbatical leave, visiting several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and in the USA, including three months at General Atomics in San Diego. In 1996-1997, during a second period at JET, he participated in the fusion power worlds record experiments in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas at JET. In 1997 he was nominated Assistant Professor in MIT Physics Department, where he led a basic plasma physics group and the international collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001 Ambrogio FASOLI was nominated Assistant Professor of Physics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professeur Boursier of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He became member of CRPP Directorate and took the leadership of CRPP basic plasma physics group and of the TCV tokamak, one of the major fusion experiments worldwide. At European level he was scientific coordinator for JET experiments, spokesperson for multi-machine experiments in the frame of International Tokamak Physics Activities, and Project Leader for a JET Enhancement project. In 2005 he became Associate Professor of Physics with tenure at EPFL, then member of EFDA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and of the Steering Committee of the Association EURATOM-Swiss Confederation. From 2006 he was also Deputy Director, then from 2007 Executive Director of CRPP and from 2008 Full Professor of Physics at EPFL. For a number of years he was the Chair of the EPFL Physics Strategic Committee and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL School of Sciences. Since the summer of 2014 Professor FASOLI was the sole Director of CRPP. He now represents Switzerland in the EUROfusion General Assembly and Bureau, and in the Governing Board for Fusion for Energy. He is member of the EUROfusion DEMO project Board, of the Scientific Board of the Helmotz Virtual Institute on Advanced Microwave Diagnostics, of the European Delegation for the Cooperation between Euratom and the Government of India in Fusion Energy Research, of the European Consortium for the development of the ITER gyratron (EGYC), and participates to numerous international review panels. He chairs the FuseNet Academic Council, the International Advisory Panel for the Laboratory of Excellence Plas@Par in the Sorbonne Universities, the European Consortium for the construction of the ITER microwave Upper Launcher (ECHUL), and the Promotion Committee of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. He is one the three European representatives in the International Tokamak Physics Activities Coordinating Committee, advising ITER, and the Editor-in-Chief of the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion. Since January 2019, Ambrogio Fasoli is the Chair of the General Assembly, i.e. the president of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for Development of Fusion Energy. Professor FASOLI is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and since 2001 a Visiting Professor at MIT Physics Department. He is the Director of the Swiss Plasma Center.

Jonathan Graves

Prof. Jonathan P. Graves is a Senior Scientist at EPFL and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. He achieved first class joint honours in Electronic Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK in 1996. He completed his Ph.D. in Theoretical Mechanics from the University of Nottingham, UK, three years later in 1999. During his Ph.D. he was based in the Culham theory group of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, developing kinetic descriptions of the internal kink instability, and participating in deuterium-tritium experimental analysis in the Joint European Torus. After a short time in industry, and a postdoc at Nottingham University, he took a position at the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL, becoming a Senior Scientist in 2014, and became an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK, in 2020. In 2015 he became a member of the EUROfusion Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) and a member of the EUROfusion DEMO Technical Advisory Group. He is on the editorial board for the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, and in 2020 became Scientific Secretary of the Varenna-Lausanne International Workshop in Theory of Fusion Plasmas.

Duccio Testa

Yves Martin

Patrick Blanchard