John Lindl
John D. Lindl (born July 27, 1946 in Toledo, Ohio) is an American physicist who specializes in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). He is currently the chief scientist of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Early life and career Lindl obtained a B.S in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University in 1972. His Ph.D. thesis advisor was John M. Dawson. In the same year, Lindl joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he worked for John Nuckolls in the early days of inertial fusion research (e.g. optimal target design for lasers and particle beams, hydrodynamic instabilities, plasma development in the cavity and cavity design, implosion symmetry). In 1976, he was involved in the design of the first laser fusion experiments with the Cyclops laser. In 1983, he was deputy program manager for theory and target design in the ICF program of the LLNL. In 1990, he became head of the Nova Laser program to demonstrate the use of a 1 to 2 megajoule laser for inertial fusion. After the ICF research at LLNL became declassified in 1993, Lindl wrote an overview article in Physics of Plasmas, which