On these pages, you will find information about our research group at the University of California, Berkeley.
Our research spans a variety of high-energy-density plasma environments including fusion and laboratory astrophysics, produced using both laser-driven and pulsed-power facilities. Experiments are a key part of testing and understanding these extreme plasma conditions, and we use facilities including the NIF (LLNL), Omega (LLE), and Orion (AWE, UK), as well as more hands-on laboratory facilities such as BELLA (LBNL), JLF (LLNL), and ZEUS (University of Michigan). Diagnostics are essential for probing these extreme environments, and we are developing new techniques and designs to investigate the physics that governs them.
Across these pages, we hope you will find information about our team, our research, and opportunities to get involved, but please reach out if you have any other questions!
Ellie Tubman is an experimental physicist working on laser-driven fusion and laboratory astrophysics. Ellie completed her undergraduate studies, gaining an MPhys degree in Physics at the University of Sussex, UK in 2012. Her masters thesis was working on particle physics, looking for SUSY particles at the ATLAS detector. She then went on to study for a PhD at the University of York, UK through their fusion centre for doctoral training under the supervision of Prof. Nigel Woolsey. Her thesis was entitled ‘Magnetic field generation in laser-plasma interactions’.
After completion of her PhD in 2016 she took a position at Imperial College London, UK as a research associate working on the MAGPIE pulsed power machine with a team led by Prof. Sergey Lebedev. Her research then led her to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where she collaborated on numerous projects at the NIF and using the Omega laser facility.
She took a lecturer role at Imperial College London from 2023-2024 before moving to UC Berkeley in 2024. Her research focuses on investigating the generation of magnetic fields within fusion conditions as well as the production of collisionless shock waves. Alongside these key experiments she is working of the development of diagnostics, including expanding the methods to measure electromagnetic fields.
Outside of work she is a keen sailor and triathlete!