Fatima Ebrahimi

Fatima Ebrahimi is a Principal Research Physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) Theory Department and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University. She leads the Discovery Plasma Theory Group at PPPL and serves as the group leader for Solenoid-free Start-up & Ramp-up in NSTX-U.

Dr. Ebrahimi has over 20 years of experience in extended MHD theory and high-performance computations with applications to laboratory fusion and astrophysical plasmas. Her research focuses on plasmoid-mediated reconnection in fusion plasmas, space propulsion, and nonlinear edge localized modes in tokamaks. She pioneered the concept for a plasma thruster utilizing fast magnetic reconnection (published in Journal of Plasma Physics 86, Issue 6, 2020, which became the most read article in JPP). Her work also includes direct large-scale dynamo field calculations and discovery of a new global magneto-curvature mode in differentially rotating systems.

Dr. Ebrahimi is the Principal Investigator of a 4-year multi-institutional FES/ASCR SciDAC (DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) project and has led numerous DOE and NSF grants throughout her career. She has held significant leadership positions including serving on executive committees for the Division of Plasma Physics (2013-2016), Topical Group in Astrophysical Plasma (2018-2021), and Division of Computational Physics (2021-2024). She chaired the DPP public information committee in 2021 and serves on the APS informing the public committees (2022-2025).

• PI of multi-institutional FES/ASCR SciDAC project
• Member of APS-DCOMP Fellowship Selection Committee
• Program committee member for U.S. Magnetic Fusion Research Strategic Directions (2017-2018)
• Host and program chair of international Sherwood fusion theory conference

Before joining PPPL in 2013, Dr. Ebrahimi held research positions at the Alfven Laboratory (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), the NSF Frontier Center for Magnetic Self-Organization (University of Wisconsin), and as a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. She earned her BS and MS from Tehran Polytechnic and her Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison.