Joshua Burby

Professor Burby has undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Cornell University and Princeton University, respectively. He received postdoctoral fellowships from the US DOE (FES), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Viterbi), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Feynman). Before coming to UT Austin, he was a staff scientist at Los Alamos in the Applied Mathematics and Plasma Physics group T-5. 

Professor Burby is a mathematical plasma physicist whose research centers on stellarator magnetic fusion. Stellarators confine hot plasma using geometrically- and topologically-complex three-dimensional magnetic fields. Burby uses intuition from symplectic geometry, dynamical systems theory and asymptotic analysis to answer foundational questions about stellarator fusion, such as “which magnetic fields confine individual charged particles?” or “what is the best way to compute stellarator equilibria?”