Bruno Coppi is an Italian-American 🏷️#physicist, professor of physics emeritus at MIT, and the originator of the Alcator program — the line of compact, high-field 📝tokamaks from which 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems's approach descends. Born in Gonzaga, Italy in 1935, he joined the MIT faculty in 1969 and held it until 2012.

Coppi conceived Alcator in the late 1960s and gave it its name, from the Italian alto campo torus — high-field torus. Working with engineers at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, he pursued a machine small in radius and extreme in field at a time when the international mainline was moving toward larger, lower-field designs, a divergence that defined MIT's program for the next fifty years. Alcator A set a world record for 📝plasma confinement, and its successors ran at MIT through 📝Alcator C-Mod's shutdown in 2016. He also founded Italy's Frascati Torus and the Ignitor program, which pursued high-field 📝ignition with copper magnets rather than superconductors. He received the American Physical Society's James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 1987.