5/21/2025 Phillip Kisubika
Written by Phillip Kisubika
Sometimes, when you are ahead of the curve, it takes time for the world to catch up. For David Ruzic, that recognition is happening more and more.
Ruzic—a professor emeritus in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—was recently named the winner of the IUVSTA Prize for Technology.
The worldwide prize is awarded every three years to recognize and encourage outstanding internationally-acclaimed achievements in technology and instrumentation in the fields of interest to the International Union for Vacuum Science, Technique and Applications (IUVSTA).
“Basically, it's all of the types of science you would do generally when you have to have it inside a vacuum system,” Ruzic said of IUVSTA’s purview. “Making computer chips is all done inside a vacuum system. Fusion is done inside a vacuum system. You have to get rid of the air before you can do stuff.”
As part of the nomination process, Ruzic had to receive supporting letters from colleagues from at least three different countries and have the backing of his home country’s society—in this case, the American Vacuum Society (AVS), from which he has won previous awards.
In his congratulatory message, Ruzic’s citation for the award is for “outstanding achievements in pioneering work in magnetron sputtering development and the use of liquid lithium in fusion technology.” He pointed to his wide-ranging research over the past four decades, including securing at least 15 patents and developing the technology to actually use flowing molten lithium in a fusion device.
“I've been convinced for a long time this is the right path to fusion energy and convincing other people that this is the right path to make fusion energy has been a 20-year challenge and still is,” Ruzic said. “But some private companies, including Tokamak Energy, who's funding us in a big way, seem to agree, and so this ability to utilize and develop the technology to allow flowing molten lithium to be used in a fusion device is has turned out to be something noteworthy as well.”
The path to this point was long, and Ruzic was met with some detractors along the way.
“I was criticized…well, it was a suggestion 20 to 25 years ago in my career saying, ‘You're working in too many areas. You should really pick one and then you can become really famous in it,’” Ruzic said. “I didn't choose that route because I saw the important synergies between the different things that still use the same core science.”
Seeing how plasmas can interact with materials and how plasma processing used in semiconductors could relate to fusion technology has led, over the years, to the creation of the Center for Plasma Material Interactions (CPMI), which has housed Ruzic’s research for decades.
More recently, Ruzic has led a charge to integrate research and industry through the Illinois Plasma Institute (IPI), which combines education with the drive to take innovations to market through commercial partnerships. “The real key with the IPI concept is that companies come and put people here, they bring their machines, and we can now advance that technology readiness more quickly into them,” he said.
The IUVSTA Prize for Technology will be formally presented to Professor Ruzic at the International Vacuum Congress (IVC-23) in Sydney, Australia this September.
“I got lucky,” Ruzic said. “The things I started working on 20 years ago actually have turned out to really work and I've had phenomenal students that have been able to carry that forward, too.”