PhD Student at Princeton University

2024 – 2025

Sina Atalay

After my internship at CERN, I began my PhD at Princeton University's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as part of the Plasma Control Group.

My focus was on the geometry optimization of high-temperature superconducting pancake coils, aiming to achieve stronger magnetic fields, one of the keys for advancing fusion energy systems. To do this, I built a differentiable simulation in JAX, optimizing coil geometry by minimizing a loss function with automatic differentiation (same principles behind modern ML).

My work involved solving elliptic integrals, but JAX didn't support them. So I wrote a package called "jaxellip" and open-sourced it on GitHub.

As part of the "Software Engineering for Scientific Computing" class, we developed our own finite-element software with built-in CAD, meshing, and solver. It's open-source on GitHub: FastFEM.

I also did some work on stochastic coil optimization for stellarators, contributing to DESC, a stellarator optimization code developed in my group (see the PR).

In May 2025, I paused my PhD studies to fully commit to building Academa.