Tihiro Ohkawa

was a Japanese physicist whose field of work was in plasma physics and fusion power. He was a pioneer in developing ways to generate electricity by nuclear fusion when he worked at General Atomics. Ohkawa died September 27, 2014, in La Jolla, California, at the age of 86. He studied physics at the University of Tokyo in 1950, and was a member of the Yoshio Nishina group for researching cosmic altitude radiation for 16 years even during the World War II. which was then later confirmed by experiments.

In 1968, Ohkawa demonstrated that the plasma-current multipole configuration used to trap plasmas was stable, which resulted in the development of a series of tokamaks with vertically elongated plasma cross sections called the doublet. This eventually led to General Atomics' DIII-D tokamak, which influenced the design and concept of ITER.

Ohkawa was also involved in the use of radioactive isotopes in the separation of nuclear isotopes from nuclear waste (at the Archimedes Technology Group in San Diego, which he founded).

Ohkawa holds over 50 patents, in areas such as tile accelerators, fusion technology and biotechnology.

Honors and awards In 1968, Ohkawa became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1979, he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for "his development of multi-current or doublet approach to the design of tokamaks with non-circular cross sections and for investigation of plasma confinement in toroidal multipoles".

He also received the 1984 Fusion Power Associates Leadership Award.