Dr. Carl Sovinec is a computational plasma physicist and university-level educator.  He began his scientific career as a research officer in the U.S. Air Force simulating pulsed-power experiments with the 2D shock-capturing MHD code, MACH2.  Since then, his research has primarily focused on magnetic-confinement fusion.  He and his group of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have simulated 3D magnetic relaxation in reversed-field pinches (RFPs) and spheromaks, disruption physics in tokamaks, magnetic-island formation in stellarators, and noninductive startup in spherical tokamaks.  He is one of the primary architects and developers of the NIMROD simulation code, and he developed novel numerical methods for its 2-fluid (electron-ion) advance and to stabilize numerical interchange.

Sovinec received his PhD from UW-Madison in 1995 before becoming a postdoc and staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  He subsequently held a faculty position in Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics at UW-Madison, where he is now a professor emeritus.  He remains active in mentoring graduate students researching plasma theory and computation.  He is an associate editor of the AIP journal Physics of Plasmas and a fellow of the American Physical Society.