The Washington Post published a profile of Tammy Ma (BS ’05), who directs the Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Ma’s Caltech connection runs deep. She first visited the unfinished National Ignition Facility as a summer intern at Livermore, in the break between high school and her freshman year. Standing below the 30-foot-diameter target chamber, lowered into place by cranes so the stadium-size facility could be built around it, she decided she wanted to do science at that scale. She went on to major in aerospace engineering at Caltech, then earned her MS and PhD at UC San Diego before returning to Livermore as a staff scientist.
The profile centers on the December 2022 ignition milestone, when NIF’s 192 lasers forced atoms in a peppercorn-size fuel pellet to fuse and produce a net energy gain — a first in the decades-long pursuit of fusion energy. Ma was asleep when it happened. She learned the next morning from her staff as she prepared to board a flight, and called her mother from SFO.
Ma is candid about the gap between proof of concept and power plant, and about the hype cycle now surrounding fusion — driven by real advances, AI applications, venture capital, and what she describes as some overpromising. The article covers Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ magnet-based approach, the Trump administration’s deal with TAE Technologies, and the wave of startups entering the field.
Ma is also frank about NIF’s national security mission — using the world’s most energetic laser to study matter under extreme conditions and validate weapons physics without detonation. She doesn’t shy away from calling fusion a nuclear technology, placing herself in what she describes as a different camp from researchers who avoid the term.