Matthew L. Reinke is a 🏷️#physicist who leads the diagnostics team for 📝SPARC at 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems — the instruments that will determine whether the machine did what it was built to do. He is lead author of "Overview of the early campaign diagnostics for the SPARC tokamak," an invited 2024 paper in Review of Scientific Instruments carrying 87 co-authors.

Reinke earned his doctorate at MIT and worked on 📝Alcator C-Mod before a stint lecturing at the University of York and five years as an R&D staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; he joined CFS in September 2020. His diagnostic set spans 📝Thomson scattering, 📝interferometry, 📝bolometers, 📝soft X-ray imaging, 📝neutron diagnostics and 📝magnetics diagnostics, assembled under a constraint most tokamaks never face: the ports are few, the 📝neutron flux is high, and the first campaign has to produce publishable data. He is also lead author of the 2023 Physics of Plasmas paper "The role of peer review in the pursuit of commercial fusion energy," written with 📝Brandon Sorbom and 📝Martin Greenwald. "A high-temperature plasma is giving off copious amounts of information about itself, broadcasting its behavior," he has said of the problem.