Jonathan Lee

Hometown: Newton, Massachusetts, USA

Fall 2021 – present

PhD in Materials Science and Engineering

FSU Legacy Fellowship

Educational/Professional Background

Previous Degree: B.S. Materials Science and Engineering from U.C. Berkeley (Class of 2021) Previous Work Experience #1: Technical Intern at Berkeley Lab, working in the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics (ATAP) division to perform quality assurance for the Large Hadron Collider Accelerator Upgrade Project (LHC-AUP) Previous Work Experience #2: Intern at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), working in the High Temperature Superconductivity Quality Assurance (HTS QA) division to provide superconducting material for the SPARC fusion reactor project

Research and Teaching Interests, or Professional Field

My research focuses upon improving our understanding of ReBCO (rare earth barium copper oxide) superconductors for high-field magnet applications. Now that manufacturers have figured out how to synthesize ReBCO on an industrial scale, the community is excited to begin using it to build increasingly-powerful magnets--but the Little Big Coil and other experiments at the Applied Superconductivity Center (ASC) have revealed a problem. This industrialized ReBCO differs substantially from the idealized picture of ReBCO we have in our heads! When subjected to intense electromagnetic and mechanical forces within real magnets, ReBCO warps, cracks, and burns in all sorts of unexpected ways. If we are to use ReBCO to its fullest potential, we must figure out how to quality-control it more efficiently and manufacture it more effectively. To this end, my research (and that of the ASC in general) uses a host of experiments, characterization techniques, and numerical simulations in order to figure out the principles and best practices of ReBCO magnet design.