Dr. Eric Held is a computational plasma physicist working on hybrid fluid/kinetic models of magnetized plasmas.  Dr. Held was one of the early fellows in the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1995-1999.  He began his research career at LANL as an ORISE postdoctoral fellow working in the T-15 group.  He started as an assistant professor at Utah State University (USU) in August of 2000.  He obtained early tenure by teaching undergraduate and graduate courses at a high level and by securing multiple DOE grants for his novel work on hybrid fluid/kinetic models.  He was promoted to full professor in July 2011 as he continued to lead the fusion theory and computation group, which included associate research professor, Dr. Jeong-Young Ji (2005-present), and research scientist, Dr. Andrew Spencer (2017-2025).  Together the group mentored a total of 9 PhD students (7 were Dr. Held's).  These students have gone onto successful careers as computational physicists in university, national lab and industry settings.  In July of 2025, Dr. Held joined his NIMROD colleagues as a partner at Fiat Lux, LLC.

Dr. Held is an expert on coupling solutions of plasma kinetic equations to evolving plasma fluid models like that of the NIMROD code.  Over his 25 years at USU, he authored or co-authored over 40 reviewed publications and brought in over 6 million dollars of DOE research funding.  Several of these grants were associated with the DOE SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) effort and had the USU fusion group collaborating closely with plasma physicists at Princeton, MIT and Wisconsin.   Dr. Held also had success teaching a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses throughout his career.  From the rather large Physics for Scientists and Engineers I & II, which he taught from 2013-2019, to smaller undergraduate (Classical Mechanics I & II, Waves, Quantum Mechanics I & II) and graduate (Classical Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics, Plasma Physics and Computational Physics) classes, students appreciated Dr. Held's enthusiasm for teaching well and his concern for their academic success.