PPPL

Choongseock "CS" Chang

  • phone: 609-243-2127
  • email: cschang@pppl.gov

Dr. Choongseok “CS” Chang has managed several large scale, multi-institutional, multidisciplinary DOE awarded projects for two decades, which included the Fusion Simulation Prototype Center for integrated edge plasma study CPES (lead PI), the SciDAC-2 (lead PI), SciDAC-3 (lead PI) and SciDAC-4 (lead PI) fusion edge simulation centers, the ECP Whole Device Modeling project WDMApp (Co-lead PI), and the ECP co-design project CoPA (Institutional PI). The unique modern fusion gyrokinetic edge code XGC (X-point included Gyrokinetic Code) developed under his leadership has become one of the representative US exascale codes, co-developed under long and close collaboration with applied mathematicians, computer scientists, performance engineers and national/international physicists.

CS Chang is a Managing Principal Physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a “Sits-with-Committee” member of Princeton University PICSciE (Princeton Institute for Computational Science & Engineering). Before joining Princeton, he was a Physics Professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and, jointly, a Research Professor at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. In his early days, he held a Senior Scientist position at General Atomics. He had his B.S. degree in Physics from Seoul National University in 1974 and Ph.D. degree in Physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1979.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an ITER Science Fellow, with broad and in-depth research experience in computational and data sciences, fusion plasma physics, industrial plasmas, and strongly interacting bio molecular system. He is currently engaged in extreme scale super-computing research activities, including exascale computing, on multiscale turbulent self-organization and transport physics in magnetically confinement plasma. He has been serving or chairing in numerous national and international advisory and executive committees. He has given countless keynote speeches, tutorial lectures and invited talks at major scientific conferences. He gave multiple lectures at ITER Summer Schools. He has produced more than two dozen Ph.D.'s and trained similar number of postdoctoral scientists.

He headed the Exascale Requirement Review and Report for the US DOE Office of Science, Advanced Scientific computing Research and Fusion Energy Sciences in 2016. He headed the Physics Design Activities of the Korean Supercomputing Tokamak Research tokamak (KSTAR) in 1995-1998 and chaired the Korean Physical Society Plasma Physics Division in 1998-2000. He organized Plasma Kinetic Summer School for several years in 2000s to raise the level of plasma physics understanding of early career fusion scientists in Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China and India).

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