U of A creates post aiming to bring fusion energy to market

The University of Arizona has created a new $275,000-a-year position of special advisor for fusion energy commercialization.

Horst Hahn, a materials scientist, will advise Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, the UA’s senior vice president for research and innovation.

Hahn’s hiring reinforces “the university’s commitment to tackling global grand challenges while advancing innovation that supports Arizona’s economic growth and workforce development,” Díaz de la Rubia said in a news release.

A Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors and the Materials Research Society, Hahn will work on securing funding, building networks and ensuring UA initiatives align with national energy priorities, the release says.

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“Safeguarding Arizona’s water and energy future through the commercialization of fusion energy” is one of four research areas that UA President Suresh Garimella and Díaz de la Rubia recently announced the university will focus on as “areas of great strategic importance to our state and nation.”

The other areas are advancing UA’s leadership in space sciences, space technology, and national security; enhancing biomedical discovery and health-care outcomes with artificial intelligence and machine learning; and modernizing mining for critical minerals. UA announced a $20 million investment in the areas in early March.

“Fusion energy is difficult, but it will be conquered on Earth one day. And, we want to be the ones that conquer fusion energy,” Díaz de la Rubia told the Arizona Daily Star in an interview earlier this month. “The sun powers everything that we do, and so, we want to conquer it here on Earth and be the ones that bring it to the markets, that develop the technologies, engineering, the solutions that are going to allow us to have a future of energy abundance for the planet — not just for us, for our water, and for our needs, but really, for the planet.”

Hahn has held positions including executive director of the Institute of Nanotechnology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany; head of the KIT-TUD Joint Research Laboratory for Nanomaterials at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt; and founding director of Germany’s Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage.

His own research focuses on high-entropy materials, nanocrystalline structures, printed electronics and energy storage solutions.