Diego Del-Castillo-Negrete is receiving a Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference award from Great Minds in STEM. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, DOE
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Diego Del-Castillo-Negrete, a distinguished staff member in the Fusion Energy Division, is being honored for his scientific achievements with a Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference, or HENAAC, award given by Great Minds in STEM, a nonprofit organization that focuses on STEM education awareness programs in underserved communities.
Del-Castillo-Negrete was cited for Outstanding Technical Achievement – National Laboratory. He will be recognized during the GMiS annual conference, which will be held virtually Oct. 11-22. The HENAAC awards program is in its 33rd year.
Del-Castillo-Negrete’s research interests span a wide spectrum of topics in plasma theory, nonlinear dynamics, mathematical modeling and computational physics. His current research is focused on runaway electrons in tokamak disruptions and anomalous transport in magnetically confined fusion plasmas.
He is ORNL’s principal investigator for the Department of Energy Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program’s Simulation Center for Runaway Electron Avoidance and Mitigation. The project seeks to combine advanced simulation and analysis capability with theoretical models and code development to advance our understanding of the physics of relativistic runaway electrons generated during magnetic disruptions in fusion plasmas.
Del-Castillo-Negrete has been a visiting scholar at research institutions in France, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Japan and the United States. He has presented over 150 invited talks and his publications have received more than 4,000 citations. Before joining the lab in 2000, he held positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of California San Diego.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
