Ben Levitt
VP of Fusion Science
Ben Levitt is Zap’s Vice President of Fusion Science, leading the team developing the plasma core at the heart of Zap's fusion power systems and scaling performance of Zap’s sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch configuration toward commercialization.
Levitt has spent much of his career across industry and academia developing systems and devices at the confluence of plasma and accelerator physics. His work spans energy ranges from near absolute zero to tens of GeV and confinement devices for single electrons up to fusion-grade plasmas. He earned a PhD in Experimental Plasma Physics from Columbia University studying dipole-confined plasmas and did a postdoctoral fellowship at CERN and Harvard University. He left academia to work on applied problems in industry, spending over a decade at Schlumberger-Doll Research in Cambridge, MA, developing and industrializing novel accelerators for energy industry applications. Levitt joined Zap in 2020, growing and leading Zap modeling, experimental, and engineering teams through rapid research and development cycles, new system builds, and significant scientific advances pushing Zap’s fusion concept toward commercialization.