Dear Colleagues,

I am very sorry to inform you of the passing of our friend and colleague Joel Hosea, a physicist here for 50 years. Joel died on Aug. 25.

Joel was an internationally-known expert in radio frequency (RF) heating of plasmas, and his contributions to the field were immense. He worked on many of PPPL's major experiments starting with the Model C Stellarator, and including the Symmetric Tokamak (ST), and the Princeton Large Torus (PLT), on which he was the project head. He was tokamak operations head for D-T (deuterium-tritium) on the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR). He later became head of the Experiment Department, and then the leader of the RF group for the National Spherical Torus Experiment. He led RF collaborations on MIT's C-Mod, DIII-D at General Atomics, the EAST device in China and the KSTAR tokamak in Korea. He was well-known as a mentor to many scientists and engineers, and was a passionate supporter of the Lab. Well-liked, always helpful, easy to talk to, Joel was an excellent scientist whose conversation, good humor and superb insight will be sorely missed.

Joel is survived by his wife, Kathy, three grown children, Devon, Christopher, and Stephanie, as well as grandchildren. The family plans a memorial service at a later date. Please keep them in your thoughts.