Ian H. Hutchinson is Professor and Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.  His primary research interest is the magnetic confinement of plasmas: seeking to enable fusion reactions, the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. He and his MIT team designed, built and operate the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, an experiment whose magnetically confined plasmas, with temperatures reaching beyond 50 million degrees Celsius, are prototypical of a future fusion reactor. He is the author of over 130 journal articles and of the key text on plasma measurements: “Principles of Plasma Diagnostics”.  He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, and Chairman-Elect of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. His responsibility for Nuclear Engineering at MIT has led him to develop a broad perspective on the present and future prospects for nuclear energy, which has informed technical and non-technical audiences across the nation.