Ronald C. Davidson

Who is Ronald C. Davidson?

Ronald C. Davidson is a Canadian physicist, professor and scientific administrator who works in the United States. He served as the first director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center from 1978 to 1988, and as director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1991 to 1996. He has been Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University since 1991.

Davidson was born in Norwich, Ontario, Canada, and received his bachelor's degree from McMaster University in 1963, and his doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1966. As a Post-Doc he was at the University of California, Berkeley from 1966 to 1968. In 1968 he went to work teaching at the University of Maryland where he became a full professor in 1972. In 1978 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he taught until 1991.

Davidson is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Leadership Award from Fusion Power Associates in 1986 and the 2005 IEEE Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award. In 2008, Davidson received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics for fundamental contributions to physics in the areas of non-neutral plasmas, particle beams of high intensity and collective non-linear interaction processes in high temperature plasmas.