Andrea Lynn "Annie" Kritcher is an American nuclear engineer and physicist who works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

[3][4][5][6] She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate studies, where she earned a master's degree and doctorate in nuclear engineering.

[10] Kritcher was made a permanent member of staff in the Weapons and Complex Integration's Design Physics Division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2012.

The explosion creates a shockwave that travels through the fuel target, resulting in sufficient heat and compression for the fusion to begin.

[9] Her citation read, “for leadership in integrated hohlraum design physics leading to the creation of the first laboratory burning and igniting fusion plasma.”[17] Kritcher went on to study the behavior of ions in inertial confinement fusion, showing that the energy of neutrons produced from a deuterium–tritium plasma recorded experimentally was higher than could be predicted from the hydrodynamics-informed algorithms that simulate inertial confinement implosions.