Raghavan Jayakumar

Author of two science books and one science fiction (as of July 2026) and over a hundred peer reviewed science papers and two science, philosophy and society papers, Dr. Raghavan (Jay) Jayakumar is a retired physicist who worked and taught in Universities, National laboratories in US, Europe and India and in industry. Dr.Jayakumar worked as a plasma physicist on magnetic confinement devices at General Atomics, CA (as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employee), in Cornell University, NY and at the Institute of Plasma Research, India. In his early career of 13 years Dr. Jayakumar worked on the development of plasma technology devices and on MHD power generation. At the High Voltage Lab in Cornell, Dr. Jayakumar did seminal research on compact toroids and high energy particle rings for plasma confinement. At the General Electric, Dr. Jayakumar designed and developed superconducting magnets for MRI. As an accelerator physicist, Dr. Jayakumar was, at first, the leader of the Superconducting accelerator magnet development and then became the deputy leader of the 2 Terra Electron Volt High Energy Booster at the Superconducting SuperCollider, TX. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, he was the US magnet team leader on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and led the Central Solenoid Model Coil project (also as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employee). At the General Atomics, Dr. Jayakumar worked on the fusion device tokamak and was an expert on plasma current profile measurement and control. During the last year of his employed work, he worked on Spheromak research and retired in 2007.

He continues to be active in science, as well as in causes linked to social justice, politics, climate change, and philanthropy.

His full bio can be seen at the author's own website under raghavanjayakumar.