Uri Shumlak
Chief Scientist & Co-founder
Uri Shumlak, Zap’s Chief Scientist, is a world-renowned theoretical, computational, and experimental plasma physicist and co-founder of Zap Energy. He has led development of the sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion concept since the 1990s.
Shumlak received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and worked at the Air Force Phillips Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, before joining the University of Washington in 1994. Shumlak established the theoretical foundations of the sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch concept, and is Principal Investigator of the UW ZaP, ZaP-HD, and FuZE flow Z-pinch research projects, as well as the UW Computational Plasma Dynamics Laboratory group. He has won numerous awards for his teaching, research, and mentoring, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and IEEE. Shumlak co-founded Zap Energy with Benj Conway and Brian A. Nelson in 2017.