Keith Howard Burrell (born April 13, 1947 in Santa Monica, California) is an American plasma physicist.
[1] Burrell received bachelor's degree in physics from Stanford University in 1968.
Before that, he did research at the ISX-A and ISA-B Tokamak of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
[2] He played an important role in the study of the H-mode (i.e. high-confinement mode) discovered in 1982 at the ASDEX tokamak in magnetically enclosed fusion plasmas and the underlying transport mechanisms, in particular the suppression of turbulence by the formation of shear currents.
[9] In 2018, he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for "pioneering research, including key experimental advances and diagnostic development, that established the links between sheared plasma flow and turbulent transport, leading to improved confinement regimes for magnetized plasmas through turbulent transport reduction by sheared flow".