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Indian-Origin Georgia Tech professor receives early career award

Sourabh Saha received the award for developing cost-effective manufacturing methods for fusion energy fuel capsules.

Georgia Tech assistant professor Sourabh Saha. / Image - LinkedIn/ Sourabh Saha.

George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering’s assistant professor at Georgia Tech, Sourabh Saha, was awarded $875,000 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of its Early Career Research Program (ECRP). 

Saha’s pioneering research aims to reduce the cost of manufacturing fuel capsules for fusion energy, a process critical to developing cost-effective, clean, and reliable nuclear fusion power.

He is focused on advancing the manufacturing science needed to produce the tiny fuel capsules used in inertial fusion energy. Fusion, the same process that powers the sun, offers the potential for a nearly limitless and clean source of energy. However, creating fusion energy on Earth remains a challenge due to the high cost and complexity of producing fusion fuel capsules. 

Saha’s work seeks to reduce these costs from tens of thousands of dollars to less than a dollar per capsule by developing scalable, precise manufacturing methods.

“The DOE award allows our group to do precisely this kind of research in the area of fusion energy. I am humbled to be able to work on one of the most challenging but worthwhile problems of our time,” Saha said.

Saha joined Georgia Tech in 2019 after serving as a research engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He leads the Scalable Technologies for Advanced Manufacturing (STEAM) group at Georgia Tech, which focuses on developing innovative methods for producing complex 3D structures at the micro and nanoscale.

Saha is one of 91 scientists across the nation to receive this year’s ECRP grant, which supports researchers in the early stages of their careers. The DOE’s total funding for these awards reached $138 million in 2024.

Saha earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 and holds B.Tech and M.Tech degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
 

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