It is possible that no one at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has deeper roots here than Bob Ellis. The son of a well-known physicist, Ellis has spent almost four decades designing and overseeing construction of components of some of the world’s biggest fusion experiments, from PPPL’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor and the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade, to the Joint European Torus in England and the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research fusion reactor in South Korea.