Thomas M. Antonsen Jr.

Thomas M. Antonsen Jr. was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1950. He received his Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1973, and his Master’s and Ph. D. degrees in 1976 and 1977, all from Cornell University. He was a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in 1976-1977, and a Research Scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT from 1977 to 1980. In 1980 he moved to the University of Maryland where he joined the faculty of the departments of Electrical Engineering and Physics in 1984.

He is currently Professor of Physics and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor of Electrophysics. Professor Antonsen has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (U.C.S.B.), the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Institute de Physique Theorique, Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. He served as the acting director of the Institute for Plasma Research at the University of Maryland from 1998 to 2000. He was selected as a Fellow of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in 1986, and fellow of the IEEE in 2011. In 1999 he was a co-recipient of the Robert L. Woods award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics Technology, and in 2003 he received the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Award. In 2004 Professor Antonsen was given the Outstanding Faculty Research Award of the Clark School of Engineering. In 2010 he served as Chair of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society

Professor Antonsen’s Research interests include the theory of magnetically confined plasmas, the theory and design of high power sources of coherent radiation, nonlinear dynamics in fluids, and the theory of the interaction of intense laser pulses and plasmas. He is the author and coauthor of over 350 journal articles and co-author of the book “Principles of Free-electron Lasers”. Professor Antonsen has served on the editorial board of Physical Review Letters, The Physics of Fluids, and Comments on Plasma Physics.

John R. Pierce Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics 2016

For contributions to the theory of charged particle beam generation and the development of computational design tools for fast and slow wave devices.

antonsen@umd.edu