Professional Background

Robert Kirkwood began is career at the TRW corporation in 1984, where he designed particle diagnostics for the LLNL magnetic mirror program, which led to a graduate fellowship to attend MIT. At MIT, he developed the first cyclotron absorption diagnostics for tokamaks, for which he was awarded the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award from the American Physical Society. He later worked at Caltech developing wave-current drive and as a staff physicist at the Air Force Phillips Lab remotely studying energetic particles on shuttle flights.

Dr. Kirkwood moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1994 to help initiate the National Ignition Facility (NIF) program. He led multiple laser/plasma interaction experiments that formed the basis of the NIF program and provided the first demonstrations of multi-beam interactions. He subsequently led the revisions of the requirements of the NIF laser system to allow control of implosion symmetry via wavelength tuning that controlled these multi-beam interactions, and he participated in the experiments that produced implosions with yield energy comparable to the energy in the assembled fuel using this wavelength tuning. During this time, he also directed independent programs on plasma pulse compression and amplification and developed optical and x-ray diagnostics techniques for NIF.

In 2013, Dr. Kirkwood founded a program to verify and validate the models used to detect nuclear events from space based detectors, which now includes several other scientists, as well as a program to increase the energy and fluence delivered to a target by NIF beams using the plasma optics cells created by multi-beam interactions. Dr. Kirkwood has mentored numerous postdoctoral and junior scientists during his career and has been active in the American Physical Society division of plasma physics, serving on several divisional committees.

PhD in Applied Plasma Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989 under Ian Hutchinson

BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, University of California Los Angeles, 1982 and 1984 under F. F. Chen and R. J. Taylor

Fellow of the American Physical Society (2017)
“For exceptional experimental work demonstrating the importance of energy transfer between laser beams in plasmas, and subsequent intellectual leadership of the effort to develop a two-color option on the National Ignition Facility laser that is important for achieving symmetric implosions.”

American Physical Society Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research (2012)
“For predicting and demonstrating the technique of laser scatter on self-generated plasma-optics gratings that enables generation and redirection of high-energy laser beams important for indirect drive inertial confinement fusion and high-power laser-matter interactions."

Marshall Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in Plasma Physics (1991)
“For his development of a new technique for determining the momentum distribution of current carriers in tokamak plasma experiments. The experimental plasma current and the velocity dependence were shown to be in agreement with the theoretical models.”