During the following year, Porkolab worked at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, under the auspices of the Humboldt Foundation as a winner of the "US Senior Scientist Award".
In 1977, he became professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he later led the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) for many years.
Measurements corroborating the validity of the collisionless Boltzmann equation and demonstrating nonlinear scattering of Bernstein waves with wavelengths comparable to the electron Larmor radius were obtained.
Porkolab's work provided experimental verifications of Landau damping, nonlinear resonant wave-wave scattering and parametric instabilities, also predicting upper hybrid solitons.
He also carried out investigations on ion cyclotron heating and mode conversion processes in multi-ion species fusion plasmas.