Dennis Whyte is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, former director of the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and a co-founder of 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems. A Canadian-born 🏷️#physicist with more than 350 published papers, his research spans plasma confinement, plasma-surface interactions, superconducting magnets, and fusion system design.

Whyte's MIT design courses are where the high-field path took shape: the concepts underpinning both the 📝ARC reactor design study and the compact net-energy machine that became 📝SPARC were conceived or significantly advanced in classes he led to challenge fusion's assumptions. He headed MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering from 2015 to 2019, taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2002 to 2006, and leads the MIT research team on SPARC. His honors include the IAEA Nuclear Fusion Prize (2013) and the Fusion Power Associates Leadership Award (2018).