Jesse A. Rodríguez

Jesse A. Rodríguez is an assistant professor and Nesbitt Faculty Scholar in Energy Engineering in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Strongly Coupled Systems Laboratory, which focuses on using machine learning and various optimization frameworks to understand phenomena that are difficult to model using traditional methods. Systems under active study in the lab include reconfigurable plasma metamaterials, magnetic confinement nuclear fusion reactors, high-energy coaxial plasma accelerators, and metal additive manufacturing laser melt pools. 

Professor Rodríguez completed a postdoctoral research appointment at the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning at Princeton University under Dr. Bill Tang; Principal Research Scientist at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. His postdoctoral research was focused on using deep learning to predict turbulent disruption events in tokamak fusion reactors, as well as to produce tokamak digital twins. This work followed the completion of his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a Ph.D. Minor in Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University under Dr. Mark Cappelli in August 2023, his dissertation focusing on manipulating electromagnetic waves with plasma metamaterials. Rodríguez obtained his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on fluid mechanics at Stanford University in 2020, and a triple honors BS in Physics, Mathematics, and Nuclear Engineering at Oregon State University in 2018. When not working, Jesse splits his time between his family, running, golfing, watch collecting, snowboarding, rock climbing, and going to the cinema.