Donald Bruce Montgomery was an American magnet 🏷️#engineer who spent his career at MIT, serving as associate director of both the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center and the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory. He died on July 1, 2022, at the age of 89. With 📝Bruno Coppi and Ronald Parker, he led the team that designed and built the Alcator 📝tokamaks, machines that operated at fields exceeding 12 📝tesla when the rest of the field was building larger and weaker.

Montgomery co-invented the cable-in-conduit conductor with Henry Kolm and Mitch Hoenig — the conductor architecture that became the baseline for ITER and for essentially every 📝superconductor-based fusion device built since. He also co-developed the magplane magnetic-levitation concept with Kolm and Richard Thornton, and wrote Solenoid Magnet Design, a standard reference in the field. MIT's own account of his career draws the connection forward explicitly: "One can draw a straight line between these early breakthroughs in magnet technology and the resultant scientific progress that they enabled to the further evolution of magnet technology being used in 📝SPARC."