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Speaker: Matthew Lanctot, US DOE

Title: "Impact of Stakeholder Input on the Fusion Energy Sciences Program"

Abstract: The Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program within the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is the primary steward of fusion energy R&D in the U.S. The long-term trajectory of the program depends on a diversity of stakeholder input including direction from the congressional authorization and appropriation process, advice from federal advisory committees, reports from the National Academies, community workshop reports, periodic evaluations from committees of visitors, requests for information, merit reviews of submitted applications from subject matter experts, and routine information exchanges between community leaders and FES staff. This talk will discuss the role of this input on federal program management and give specific examples of how it impacts the direction of FES- funded programs.

Bio: Matthew Lanctot is a program manager working in the Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) Research Division within the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). He manages three FES program areas: the DIII-D National User Facility, Long Pulse Tokamak, and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Before joining FES in 2016, he was a staff scientist in the Magnetic Fusion Energy Division at General Atomics where he led a major study of the impact of magnetic fields from a mock ITER Test Blanket Module on ITER-relevant scenarios in DIII-D and a joint experiment on error field penetration thresholds in tokamaks within the International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA). While working as a postdoctoral researcher with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he contributed to studies of high-performance advanced tokamak scenarios by operating and analyzing data from the DIII-D motional Stark effect diagnostic. He received a doctoral degree in Applied Physics from Columbia University in 2010 for seminal work on validating models of the plasma response to applied magnetic fields whilst receiving support from a DOE graduate student fellowship.