As TAE Technologies’ Vice President of Program Management and Science Fellow, Dr. Hiroshi Gota oversees the company’s groundbreaking fusion program, including development of the company’s next generation fusion device, Copernicus. With Gota’s management and oversight, TAE built the Norman device (aka C-2W), the world’s largest compact-toroid fusion device, which has outperformed its benchmarks through targeted refinements and continued experimentation.

Hiroshi has committed the majority of his research and career to field-reversed configuration (FRC) magnetic confinement fusion, and he has worked on seven different FRC experimental devices, including three at TAE. His research has been published in more than 60 papers and articles in various scientific and technical journals. His research has been primarily focused on experimental subjects to characterize and understand FRC physics phenomena as well as to improve FRC plasma performance by optimizing experimental apparatuses. His broad experimental expertise covers a variety of plasma diagnostic skills, such as magnetics, interferometry, bolometry, spectroscopy, imaging, and tomographic reconstruction, where dedicated synthetic data analysis has been carried out as a regular basis. He also has a wide experience and knowledge in high-voltage pulsed-power systems.

At TAE, Hiroshi oversees a wide range of Norman activities that include machine operations, data collection and analysis, experimental planning, as well as setting goals and strategies for near- and long-term physics and experimental campaigns. He also manages and oversees Copernicus fusion program activities, which include defining physics design requirements, as well as engineering system design and development. Beyond TAE’s internal fusion research activities, he also manages and/or contributes to various research collaborations with external institutes and labs such as Nihon University, PPPL, UCLA, UW-Madison, NIFS, and Google.

Hiroshi is an American Physical Society (APS) lifetime member and Japan Society of Plasma Science and Nuclear Fusion Research (JSPF) member. He serves as a committee member in various scientific community workshops and conferences. He has also held a Visiting Researcher position at Nihon University since 2017.

Hiroshi joined TAE in 2007, after earning a Ph.D. in physics from Nihon University in Tokyo in 2005 and continuing his work and research as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Washington in Seattle.