| Thomas Antonsen | |
| Birth Name: | Thomas Marbory Antonsen Jr. |
| Birth Date: | 7 December 1950 |
| Birth Place: | Hackensack, New Jersey |
| Nationality: | American |
| Fields: | Plasma physics |
| Workplaces: | University of Maryland |
| Education: | Cornell University |
| Thesis Title: | Theoretical problems in plasma heating |
| Thesis Url: | https://www.proquest.com/docview/302839071/ |
| Thesis Year: | 1977 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Edward Ott |
| Awards: |
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Thomas Marbory Antonsen Jr. (born December 7, 1950) is an American physicist, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland.
Antonsen graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1973, an M.S. in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1977.[1]
He was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in 1976-77 and a research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT from 1977 to 1980. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1980 as a research assistant, where his research interests include nonlinear dynamics and chaos and plasma theory.[2] He was appointed professor at Maryland in 1989.
Antonsen was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1986 for "contributions to the theory of the stability of high temperature plasmas and the theory of the production of intense ion beams".[3] He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012 for "contributions to the theory of magnetically confined plasmas, laser-plasma interactions and high power coherent radiation sources".[4]
Antonsen was awarded the 2016 John Pierce Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics from IEEE.[5] He was also awarded the 2022 IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award[6] and the 2023 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics from the American Physical Society.[7]
Antonsen is married with 3 children.[8]