About
Dr. David Gates is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Thea Energy, a stellarator fusion startup spun out of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) that is commercializing simplified planar-coil magnet arrays to make steady-state fusion power practical. Formerly the stellarator physics leader and head of the Advanced Projects Department at PPPL (with a joint appointment at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment), he pioneered the core technology—arrays of planar (non-interlocking) coils and permanent magnets—under the ARPA-E BETHE program; this innovation earned PPPL the 2024 Edison Patent Award and has been licensed by Thea Energy for its Eos experimental stellarator and Helios power-plant designs. An internationally recognized plasma physicist and American Physical Society Fellow (2013), Dr. Gates began his career as a research associate at Culham Laboratory in the UK (1993–1997) working on the COMPASS-D and START tokamaks, then spent more than two decades at PPPL where he served as physics operator and group leader on NSTX before shifting focus to stellarators. He led U.S. collaborations on Wendelstein 7-X (Germany) and the Large Helical Device (Japan), was a visiting professor at Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science, and previously served as editor-in-chief of the journal Plasma. He holds a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics from Columbia University
