Cynthia Kieras Phillips
Cynthia Elizabeth Kieras Phillips was an American physicist known for her work on plasma, and on the use of radio waves to heat plasma for applications in magnetic confinement fusion.
Early life and education
Cynthia Kieras was born in 1954 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, grew up nearby in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and graduated from Chicopee High School in 1972.She majored in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in 1976, and then went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for graduate study in physics. There, she earned a master's degree in 1977, and completed her Ph.D. in 1982. Her doctoral dissertation, Shear Alfvén Waves in Tokamaks, was jointly supervised by John Tataronis and Keith Symon.
Career and later life
Phillips became a researcher at Princeton University in 1983, eventually becoming a principal research physicist in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a lecturer in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.She died on September 1, 2015, at the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro.