Dr. Jacob King is a computational plasma physicist with expertise in developing algorithms to drive high-performance simulations of fusion plasmas. Beginning with his PhD studies, he has worked on various confinement concepts, including reversed-field-pinch tearing-mode and z-pinch liner-implosion simulations. He collaborates extensively on the DIII-D tokamak, a Department of Energy user facility. His research on DIII-D endeavors to understand the effects of MHD perturbations in the tokamak's high-confinement edge-pedestal region and tearing-mode dynamics that can potentially degrade core performance.

In order to enable these simulations, he has made several extensions to the NIMROD MHD code, such as incorporating a resistive wall, refining the plasma initial condition, and including multiple atomic species. He also developed an efficient time-split plasma-neutral algorithm to incorporate fast atomic physics effects in long-time-scale MHD simulations. He is currently working on modernizing the code infrastructure in an open-source repository to take advantage of the capabilities of heterogeneous supercomputers that employ GPU acceleration. 

Dr. King received his PhD degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the former fusion science group leader at Tech-X Corporation and is a partner and senior research scientist at Fiat Lux. He presently serves on the DIII-D User Board and the Theory Coordinating Committee.