In the 1970s and 1980s, Conn participated in some of the earliest studies of fusion energy as a potential source of electricity, and he served on numerous federal panels, committees, and boards advising the government on the subject.
While at UC San Diego he also led the effort to establish an endowment for the school of engineering, which began with major gifts from Irwin and Joan Jacobs.
Conn's experience in the private sector includes co-founding in 1986 Plasma & Materials Technologies, Inc. (PMT), and serving as managing director of Enterprise Partners Venture Capital (EPVC) from 2002 to 2008.
[6] In 1970, Conn began his professional career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), where he joined the nuclear engineering department as a visiting associate professor.
[7] Conn's early work came at a time when the federal government was eager to develop alternative sources of energy in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.
By controlling, or confining, the flow of plasma in test reactors, engineers can cause hydrogen nuclei to collide and fuse – creating for short amounts of time a nuclear fusion reaction that generates heat.
[9] In his early work, Conn studied numerous aspects of plasma for fusion applications, including how it can be confined with magnetic fields, thereby increasing its density and the likelihood that atomic nuclei collide and fuse.
[10] Among the many reports for which Conn played a central role was the UWMAK-1 Study in 1973,[11] which became a tutorial on reactor design used by private sector companies including Westinghouse and McDonald Douglas.
[13] While at UW, Conn collaborated with his colleagues on a research program called SOLASE that studied the physics and engineering challenges of inertial confinement reactors.
The work identified the key physics, engineering, and technology issues that need to be solved if inertial fusion is to become a practical energy source.
The SOLASE program studied numerous technological challenges, ranging from delivering fuel pellets to the center of the device at a rate of one to five per second, capturing the energy from the fusion events, shielding the laser beams from pellet explosion debris, and capturing the neutrons that carry 80 percent of the energy so as to make a practical power system.
Conn's work on inertial fusion hybrid reactors was conducted under the SOLASE-H program at the University of Wisconsin, and was supported by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
[15] In 1980, Conn left Wisconsin to join the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he continued research in plasma physics and nuclear fusion, as well as in materials science and energy policy.
Conn also played a key role in the creation of PISCES, a laboratory research facility located first at UCLA and today at UC San Diego.
Conn further led the formation of a multi-lateral experiment program, the Advanced Limiter Test or ALT program, that studied plasma as it interacts with components inside a tokamak fusion experiment, in this case the former TEXTOR tokamak machine at Germany's largest national laboratory, the Forschungszentrum Jülich.
[18] At UC San Diego Conn also built partnerships between the university and private industry, establishing the von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Transfer.
In the mid-1990s he served on a committee that reviewed fusion energy for the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, also known as PCAST.
[20] During his career in academia, Conn published more than 300 journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and op-eds related to fusion energy science and engineering.
As head of The Kavli Foundation, which is based in Los Angeles, California, Conn led its efforts to support research in astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience, and theoretical physics at academic institutions around the world.