Elena V. Belova is a former Soviet and American physicist whose research involves the computer simulation of plasma, with applications ranging from the control of heat in tokamak-based fusion power[1][2] to improved understanding of jets and spheromaks in the solar corona.
[3] She works for the United States Department of Energy as a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey.
She went to Dartmouth College for graduate study in physics,[6] supervised by Mary Hudson.
[5] She finished her Ph.D. in 1997, and on completing her doctorate became a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
[7] She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2020, after a nomination from the Division of Plasma Physics, "for outstanding contributions to the development of novel numerical and theoretical models leading to improved understanding of the behavior of highly energetic particles and associated plasma instabilities in compact tori and spherical tokamaks".