Hong Sio: On the road for fusion
Graduate student Hong Sio has gotten used to being somewhere else. His research as part of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) team has rotated him from his Albany Street home facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to projects on the OMEGA laser at the University of Rochester in New York, to collaborations on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “I spent 120 days in hotel rooms last year,” he laughs. “Four months on the road.” All this travel has been necessary to support the kind of research that recently earned his fusion diagnostic a spot on the cover of an American Institute of Physics journal. Sio has been taking significant journeys since the age of 10, when his family emigrated from Macau to the U.S., settling in southern California. Sio credits a high school summer program at the University of California at...