Harold Furth

Early life Furth emigrated to the United States in 1941. His father fled a POW camp during WWI, but returned to Vienna a few years later. In his later years, he ran a shoe-making business with his family. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1951 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960. His PhD thesis is entitled Magnetic Analysis of K– Interactions in Emulsion Nuclei.

Career Furth worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1956 to 1967 before going in 1967 to Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL)

In the late 1960s, Furth contributed some important theoretical work on resistive magnetohydrodynamics instabilities in a slightly resistive plasma.

In 1981 Furth became the director at PPPL and led the laboratory until 1990 during record setting magnetic fusion energy experiments on the largest tokamak in the country, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR).

Awards In 1983, Furth was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics by the American Physical Society. In 1992, he was awarded the Delmer S. Fahrney Medal (now known as the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics) by the Franklin Institute.

Furth was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.