In Memoriam: Astrophysicist Russell Kulsrud

Russell Kulsrud, an accomplished plasma physicist and astrophysicist, died Sept. 23 at age 97. Kulsrud’s work at Princeton began in 1954 when Professor Lyman Spitzer *38 hired him to join Project Matterhorn, predecessor to the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. The work was classified, so Spitzer could not explain the job when he was hired. Kulsrud later recalled that when he received his security clearance and learned what he’d be doing — heating plasma to extremely high temperatures and confining it with a magnetic field — “I didn’t dream such things were underway.” Other than a brief stint at Yale, Kulsrud spent his entire career in Princeton, later serving as a professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received the American Physical Society’s James Clerk Maxwell Prize in 1993.