Ruben Fair is a Board Advisor specializing in Magnet Design / Magnetic Shielding. He is currently the US ITER Department Head at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Ruben has Industrial and research-based experience leading highly technical global teams with strong people management skills, design and operation of high field NMR and physics superconducting magnets, design, build and test of superconducting electrical power generators and motors, vacuum chambers, cryogenics and low temperature equipment, design of rotating electrical machines.
Ruben J. Fair received the B.Sc. (Hons.) Eng. degree and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, U.K., in 1985 and 1991, respectively. In 1988, he joined GEC-Alsthom Large Machines, Ltd., as a Hydro generator Design Engineer and left in 1994 to join Oxford Instruments (NMR Division) as a Design and Development Engineer working on a range of new superconducting magnets, including the world’s first persistent 21 Tesla, 900-MHz NMR magnet. In 1999, he became a Principal Engineer at Oxford Instruments (Research Instruments) and led a team of engineers developing superconducting magnets and ultralow temperature refrigerators for the physics community.
In 2005, he was selected to lead the New Product Introduction engineering team, at Oxford Instruments Nanoscience. In 2007, he joined Converteam (now General Electric Power Conversion) where he led a team of engineers to develop the world’s first high temperature superconducting hydro generator, and also set up a Cryogenics Laboratory. In 2010, he was recruited by the General Electric Global Research Center, Niskayuna, NY, USA, to develop a strategic road map for a range of superconducting machines. While at the research center, he led a team which was awarded funding from the Department of Energy to design a 10 MW superconducting wind turbine generator. He accepted a position as a Principal Engineer at the Jefferson Laboratory, Newport News, VA, USA, in 2013 to lead a team overseeing the design, build, installation, and commissioning of eight superconducting magnets for the 12 GeV accelerator upgrade project. He then went on to lead the Magnet Group within the Experimental Nuclear Physics Division at Jefferson Lab.
He also contributed a chapter to High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) for Energy Applications (Woodhead Publishing, 2011). He has publications in review journals and patents. Dr. Fair is a Technical Editor and Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on applied Superconductivity. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, U.K, and a Senior Member of the IEEE, USA. He is presently the department head for fusion diagnostics at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and leads PPPL’s team responsible for the design and construction of diagnostic instruments for the international fusion experiment ITER under construction in Cadarache, France.