Edgar Choueiri is Chief Scientist and Director of EPPDyL. He is a tenured Professor in the Applied Physics Group in the MAE Department and Associated Faculty at the Astrophysical Sciences Department/Program in Plasma Physics. He is also a member of the Engineering Physics Program at Princeton. Prof. Choueiri is the author of numerous papers on plasma physics, instabilities and turbulence in collisional plasmas, plasma accelerator modeling, space physics and applied mathematics.

Prof. Choueiri is the author of more than 140 journal articles, conference papers and encyclopedia articles on advanced space propulsion, plasma physics, instabilities and turbulence in collisional plasmas, plasma accelerator propulsion, space physics and applied mathematics. He has been an invited speaker on more than 50 occasions at symposia and leading institutions in the USA, Russia, China, Japan, Poland, Lebanon, Turkey, UAE, Brazil and many countries in Western Europe. He was Chair of AIAA’s Electric Propulsion Technical Committee (EPTC) from 2002 to 2004 and is the present President of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, whose members include hundreds of scientists working on plasma propulsion for spacecraft in more than 15 countries. He is currently Principal Investigator (PI) on three government-funded research projects at EPPDyL, was the PI on more than 25 research projects funded by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation, and has been PI and Co-PI on two space experiments and was selected by NASA in 2004 to lead a team of NASA and academic researchers on a 3-year project to develop a high-power plasma rocket system for the robotic and human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

He has advised more than a hundred students at Princeton University, currently advises 6 PhD students, and has graduated 10 PhD students, 8 of whom are currently working as research scientists in plasma physics or space propulsion.

He has developed new courses at Princeton in astronautics, applied physics and advanced space propulsion.

Prof. Choueiri’s publication list can be found here

Jonathan MacArthur is a postdoctoral researcher at EPPDyL. Dr. MacArthur has worked in electric propulsion and applied plasma physics research and engineering roles for NASA, industry, and academia. His specializations include general spacecraft propulsion, ion electrospray propulsion, nanotechnology, microfluidics, low temperature plasma sources, and spacecraft operations. His current research interests are in lithium MPD thrusters, novel thruster materials, and rarified gas propellants.

Harry Furey-Soper is a first-year Ph.D. student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He developed a background in experimental plasma physics research by working with optical diagnostics on the ZaP-HD Flow Z-pinch device at the University of Washington. Through engineering internships at SpaceX and Aerojet-Rocketdyne, Harry has worked on Hall Effect Thrusters for the Starlink satellite constellation and the NASA Lunar Gateway space station. His current research interests include high-power electric propulsion, plasma instabilities, and plasma-material interactions.

Zachary Plevin is pursuing a PhD in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His previous research focused on modal analysis of aerospace structures through simulation. His current research interests are in lithium MPD thrusters, electric space propulsion, and theoretical modeling of electric propulsion systems.