Andrea "Annie" Kritcher

Andrea "Annie" Kritcher is a nuclear physicist and engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She was the engineering design lead on the experiment that achieved the holy grail of nuclear physics in December 2022: the world’s first controlled nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed. Her team has repeated that feat at least four times since then.

Nuclear fusion is the mechanism that powers our sun and other stars. Unlike nuclear fission–the energy-generating reaction in today’s nuclear power plants–there are no radioactive byproducts in nuclear fusion. It is a clean source of energy that could potentially be harnessed down the road to help wean us off fossil fuels.