Dr. Swanson is the Director of Fusion Systems at Thea Energy. He joined Thea in 2022 from PPPL, where he was an associate research physicist performing systems analysis of spherical tokamak-based pilot plant designs. He previously served as the chief scientist of Princeton Satellite Systems, where he participated in FRC-based micro-reactor systems design and continued operating diagnostics for the PFRC-2 experiment at PPPL, both under an ARPA-E OPEN award. Dr. Swanson performed research under numerous small business awards, SBIRS, STTRs from the DOE and NASA, and an ARPA-E GAMOW award. The topics ranged from modeling FRC equilibria, to power electronics for magnetic control, and the design of superconducting motors for electric aircraft. He received his PhD in plasma physics from Princeton University.