Allen Wang
Bio: Allen is a PhD student majoring in Autonomous Systems in the AeroAstro department co-advised by Dr. Cristina Rea and Prof. Chuchu Fan working on plasma control. Before joining fusion, he spent two years at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) followed by two years as a roboticist at Boston Dynamics. His goal is to advance plasma control capabilities by applying techniques from the robotics and machine learning worlds to both pulse planning for SPARC, a net energy fusion experiment being built by MIT Spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and advanced control experiments on existing fusion experiments. The biggest gap towards this goal is dynamics modelling. To address this gap, much of his current work focuses on building hybrid physics + ML models. Outside of work, Allen enjoys hanging out at the Cambridge Zen Center, skiing, bouldering, leading MIT Outing Club hikes, and live music.
Email: allenw@mit.edu