Amanda Hubbard is a 🏷️#physicist and Principal Research Scientist at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, working on edge transport barriers — the 📝pedestal structures that separate 📝H-mode and I-mode confinement from ordinary 📝L-mode — and on integrating boundary solutions with core scenarios. On 📝Alcator C-Mod she was responsible for the electron cyclotron emission diagnostics that measure 📝electron temperature profiles, which is the measurement on which pedestal structure and 📝L-H transition threshold studies rest.

I-mode is a C-Mod result and Hubbard is central to it: a regime with H-mode-like energy confinement but L-mode-like particle transport, so heat stays in while impurities do not accumulate, and which runs without the 📝edge localized mode cycle. It was reported by 📝Dennis Whyte, Hubbard, 📝Jerry Hughes and colleagues in Nuclear Fusion in 2010, characterized by Hubbard in Physics of Plasmas in 2011, and mapped in Nuclear Fusion in 2012, where she set out the threshold conditions for entering I-mode and H-mode with unfavourable ion grad-B drift direction (DOI 10.1088/0029-5515/52/11/114009). Those are measurements on Alcator C-Mod, not projections. She has since worked on 📝plasma experiments at 📝ASDEX Upgrade and on high-temperature 📝superconductor magnet development for 📝SPARC, and is a co-author of the 2025 assessment of long-duration solder exposure in 📝VIPER cables. She held leadership roles in the US Burning Plasma Organization from 2006 to 2020, including deputy director, and received the Secretary of Energy's Appreciation Award in 2020 for that work.