Theodore Golfinopoulos is an 🏷️#engineer and a research scientist at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He is first author of "Building the Runway: A New Superconducting Magnet Test Facility Made for the SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil" (DOI 10.1109/TASC.2024.3352395), published in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity in 2024 with thirty-nine co-authors and 📝Zachary Hartwig last — the account of the power, 📝cryogenics, structure and instrumentation assembled around the 📝Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) so that it could be tested at all.

The title is literal. A magnet result is only as good as the facility that produced it: tens of kiloamps of current delivered into a cold volume, a coil restrained against forces that try to unwind it, and enough diagnostics to know what happened afterward. The runway Golfinopoulos and his co-authors describe carried the TFMC to 20.1 📝tesla peak field on conductor on September 5, 2021, and then to a deliberately induced 📝quench — both measured events, and the reason 📝SPARC's magnet design could be committed to production. Earlier he worked on 📝Alcator C-Mod, where his 2014 MIT doctoral work built the "Shoelace" antenna, a radio-frequency structure designed to drive edge fluctuations at the wavenumber and frequency of the quasi-coherent mode that regulates transport across the plasma boundary in enhanced-D-alpha 📝H-mode. His work also appears through 📝The TFMC Engineering Papers.