Daniel Dudt
SENIOR SCIENTIST AT THEA ENERGY
DANIEL DUDT CREDITS HIS DECISION to study mechanical engineering for opening doors to the interdisciplinary work that led him to his current role at Thea Energy. During his doctoral studies at Princeton University, Dudt found himself in a collaborative environment with plasma physicists where “half of us were engineers who had to learn more physics and the other half were physicists who had to learn more engineering.”
That experience reinforced his passion for solving complex, cross-disciplinary problems—“It’d be boring if it was too easy”—a passion he now brings to the forefront of fusion energy innovation.
At Thea, Dudt is part of a team working to bring fusion power toward commercial reality. The company’s mission is to build power plants that will connect directly to the grid. Its focus is on magnetic confinement fusion, specifically using stellarators—donut-shaped devices that trap plasma with twisted magnetic fields to achieve the extreme temperatures and densities needed for fusion.
While most magnetic confinement designs rely on tokamaks that require driving a current through plasma, Thea’s stellarator design avoids that complication. Dudt explained that this allows Thea’s machines to run continuously in steady state, with less recirculating power and more predictable operation—three significant advantages for practical power plants.
“Making a technology that was once in the realm of science fiction a reality is kind of similar to walking on the moon in terms of inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers.”
—Daniel Dudt
Based in Denver—a perfect spot for winter sports—Daniel Dudt is a competitive curler. He travels internationally to compete in the Olympic sport of sliding stones across a sheet of ice.
Historically, the challenge with stellarators has been their complex 3D geometry, making them difficult and expensive to build. Thea addresses this by simplifying the hardware, using flat, planar coils that are cheaper to manufacture and easier to mass produce and assemble, Dudt explained. “We’re moving the burden of complexity from the hardware onto the software,” he said.
As a senior scientist, Dudt works at the earliest stages of the design process, developing computational models to explore new design possibilities.
“I’m pretty early on in the design process, which is a lot of fun. I get to think of wacky ideas and then my colleagues might tell me, ‘No, that’s not possible,’” he said. His focus is on numerical optimization—balancing physics performance, engineering feasibility, and economic constraints to find the best solutions.
For decades, fusion energy was famously “always thirty years away,” but Dudt believes that’s no longer the case. Advances in high-temperature superconductors and computational modeling have brought the technology closer to reality than ever before. He sees the final stretch toward commercial fusion as no longer a physics challenge, but “really just an engineering problem. Can we design materials to withstand the heat fluxes, the stresses and strains of the big structures? Can we scale it up? Can we do it economically?”
And the cultural impact of achieving it, he said, would be profound.
“Making a technology that was once in the realm of science fiction a reality is kind of similar to walking on the moon in terms of inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers,” he said.
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