As TAE Technologies’ Vice President of Corporate Technical Initiatives and Strategic Collaborations, Dr. Hiroshi Gota oversees the company’s groundbreaking fusion program and technical initiatives, including development of the company’s first utility-scale fusion power plant. With Gota’s management and oversight, TAE built the world’s largest compact-toroid fusion device, C-2W — a.k.a. “Norman”; now called “Norm” after its machine upgrade — which outperformed its benchmarks through targeted refinements and continued experimentation.

Hiroshi oversees a wide range of fusion research work, including machine operations, data collection and analysis, and experimental campaign planning, as well as setting fusion program milestones and strategies to align with the company’s vision and near- and long-term objectives. Beyond TAE’s internal fusion research activities, he manages and contributes to various research collaborations with external institutes and labs such as Nihon University, PPPL, UCLA, UW-Madison, NIFS, and Google.

Hiroshi has committed most of his research and career to field-reversed configuration (FRC) magnetic confinement fusion, and worked on seven different FRC experimental devices to date, including three at TAE. His research publications include more than 70 peer-reviewed 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 and analysis skills, such as on magnetics, interferometry, bolometry, spectroscopy, imaging, and tomographic reconstruction, where dedicated synthetic data analysis and physics discussions have been carried out on a regular basis. He also has extensive experience in high-voltage pulsed-power systems.

 Before joining TAE in 2007, Hiroshi earned a Ph.D. in physics from Nihon University in 2005 and continued his FRC research and work at the University of Washington in Seattle. Besides TAE, he holds a Visiting Researcher position at Nihon University since 2017, and serves as a committee member in various scientific community workshops and conferences.

He is an American Physical Society (APS) lifetime member and Japan Society of Plasma Science and Nuclear Fusion Research (JSPF) member.