Biography

Jozef Ongena, Ph.D., is Research Director at the Laboratory for Plasma Physics of the Ecole Royale Militaire - Koninklijke Militaire School (LPP/ERM-KMS) in Brussels, Belgium. Dr.Ongena did his undergraduate and graduate studies in low temperature plasma physics at the University of Gent (Belgium), under the supervision of Prof.R.Bouciqué and Prof.W.Wieme graduating in 1985 with his Ph.D. on excimer formation in Krypton. Two years later Dr.Ongena started at LPP/ERM-KMS under the then director Prof.P.Vandenplas, and joined the collaboration between LPP/ERM-KMS and the Institut für Plasmaphysik of the Forschungszentrum in Jülich (FZJ), Germany. He was actively involved in ICRH and NBI heating and confinement studies on the tokamak TEXTOR and together with Dr.A.Messiaen and Prof.R.Weynants he pioneered the Radiatively Improved Confinement Mode or RI-Mode, obtained with impurity seeding using Ne, Ar and Si on TEXTOR. He also did experiments with impurity seeding on TFTR, DIII-D, Tore-Supra and JET. In 1999 he started a long term assignment on JET as Task Force Leader for the development of the H-Mode (Task Force S1, 2000-2002), then as Scientific Assistent of the JET director (2003-2004) and then as Task Force Leader for Heating Studies (Task Force H, 2005-2010). He is now project leader for the development of the ICRH system for the stellarator W7-X, in a collaborative effort between the Institute for Energy and Climate Research/Plasma Physics (IEK-4) in FZJ and LPP/ERM-KMS.