Robert Granetz is a 🏷️#physicist and Principal Research Scientist at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he works on 📝disruption physics: what a tokamak does when its 📝plasma current terminates uncontrollably in milliseconds, and what that termination does to the machine around it. He worked on 📝Alcator C-Mod from its design through its final campaign and is part of the Center's disruption research group, which in April 2026 he represented at the ITPA meeting on 📝magnetohydrodynamics, disruptions and control in Prague.

Granetz's 1996 Nuclear Fusion paper with I. H. Hutchinson and colleagues measured 📝halo currents during C-Mod disruptions — the current that leaks out of a shrinking plasma, crosses the 📝scrape-off layer, runs through the 📝vacuum vessel structure and returns — establishing their magnitude and their toroidal asymmetry, which together set the mechanical loads a vessel and its 📝first wall must survive (DOI 10.1088/0029-5515/36/5/I02). That measurement work extended into the databases the field now designs against: he is a co-author of the ITPA disruption database (Nuclear Fusion 55, 063030, 2015), led an ITPA joint experiment on 📝runaway electrons generation and suppression across several tokamaks (Physics of Plasmas, 2014, DOI 10.1063/1.4886802), and co-authored the cross-machine machine-learning disruption-warning studies that trained predictors on C-Mod, 📝DIII-D and 📝EAST data (Montes et al., Nuclear Fusion 59, 096015, 2019). He is also an author on DisruptionPy, the open-source disruption-analysis framework the group maintains.