John Howard obtained his PhD degree in 1983 in the field of plasma physics at the University of Sydney. He subsequently worked in the Dept of Electrical Engineering at UCLA until his return to the Australian National University in 1989. Prof Howard has worked on many aspects relating to the diagnosis and physics of plasmas in the H-1 heliac. He also has interests in the broad area of remote sensing and inverse methods with strong links into industry and medical imaging. He has been head of the toroidal plasma physics group since 2009.
Professor Howard is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a member of the editorial board of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. He has served on a number of international review and/or conference committees and has organised the very successful biannual Japan-Australia Plasma diagnostics workshop series since 2002. He has won more than $2.5M in research grants since 2005, has approximately 80 papers in peer reviewed journals and has delivered 8 invited talks at international conferences since 2005.
Professor Howard has supervised or advised 20 PhD or MPhil students and 10 honours students.
Research Interests
Advanced Imaging and Inverse Methods (AIIM)
Plasma diagnostic and remote sensing systems Inverse methods (tomography) Toroidal plasma confinement Coherence imaging systems
You will apply new coherence imaging cameras and develop suitable inverse procedures for spectro-polarimertic imaging of plasmas in the H-1 heliac and on fusion devices in the US and Europe.
Fast imaging systems synchronously locked to the frequency of fluctuations in the H-1 plasma will be used to identify the nature of the instabilities and their driving mechanisms.
You will devlop and apply novel interferometric techniques to image the evolution of the ratio of hydrogen and deuterium isotopes in radio frequency heated plasmas in the H-1 heliac
Hole Matthew, O'Connor D John, Blackwell Boyd, Collins George Andrew, Howard John, Cheetham A, James Brian W, Baker J, Bilek Marcela, Dewar Robert, Mather Dennis, Rubinsztein-Dunlop Halina, Soria Julio, Punzmann Horst, Bray Igor, Carman Robert John Review of the National Innovation System: Australian ITER Forum submission (2008)