Dr. Robert W. Bussard is an American physicist working primarily in nuclear fusion energy research. Bussard received his PhD from Princeton. He is currently functioning as co-founder and director of Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation. He is the former Assistant Director to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and has held prominent positions at Los Alamos National Laboratories, Oakridge Labs, and TRW Systems. Besides developing this year's winning technology, Dr. Bussard is also known for conceiving the Bussard ramjet, an interstellar spacecraft powered by hydrogen fusion using hydrogen collected from the interstellar gas utilizing a magnetic field. Dr. Bussard and his team at Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation, after close to 20 years of hard work, have developed a revolutionary radiation-free fusion process that takes boron-11 and fuses a proton to it, producing, in its excited state, a carbon-12 atom. This excited carbon-12 atom decays to beryllium-8 and helium-4. It was developed under a DOD contract and has recently been made public.