The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has honored physicist Rich Hawryluk with a Secretary’s Appreciation Award for his service to ITER, a huge international fusion experiment under construction in France.

Mr. Hawryluk, a former deputy director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), returned to the Lab in April after completing a two-year assignment as deputy director-general for the Administration Department at ITER, whose mission is to show the feasibility of fusion energy.

The DOE award, signed by former Energy Secretary Steven Chu and presented by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, recognized Hawryluk for “applying his wealth of big-science project management experience to enable the ITER project to make the transition from design phase to construction, thus helping ensure that this important international project will successfully move toward demonstrating the feasibility of fusion as a future energy source.”

Mr Hawryluk brought years of proven know-how to the ITER assignment. He joined PPPL in 1974 with a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and went on to head the Laboratory’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), which set world records for fusion power during the 1990s. He served from 1997 to 2009 as deputy director of PPPL, which Princeton University manages for DOE.

“Rich Hawryluk has an unparalleled track record in scientific and organizational leadership in the fusion energy sciences,” Edmund Synakowski, head of the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said in commenting on the award. Such leadership included Hawryluk’s guidance of the TFTR project, which “culminated in the generation of nearly 11 megawatts of fusion power,” Mr. Synakowski said.

“The Department therefore heartily supported [Hawryluk’s] willingness to respond to the call from ITER’s Director General, Osamu Motojima, to join his leadership team in Cadarache, France,” Synakowski said. “Rich served with distinction by bringing to ITER the same industry and insight that the U.S. community has come to know and admire.”

“ITER was a very interesting experience for me,” said Mr. Hawryluk. “And I learned in much more detail about the issues associated with bridging the transition from design to construction. ITER’s unprecedented size and power mark “a huge step forward from TFTR. While experiments on TFTR produced important data, ITER will show whether such results can be extrapolated into a viable source of fusion energy.”