As in previous years, the EUROfusion consortium will once again award research grants to talented young scientists from across Europe in 2026 to promote their career development in the field of fusion research. Among the nine winners of the Bernard Bigot Researcher Grant 2026 is Lidija Radovanovic from TU Wien.

With the Bernard Bigot Researcher Grants (ERG), named after the former Director-General of the ITER Organisation, EUROfusion funds individual research projects by post-docs for two years. The aim of the grants is, on the one hand, to promote excellence and career development among researchers already participating in the fusion programme and, on the other hand, to attract highly qualified potential candidates from outside fusion research. The Researcher Grants are intended to develop innovative ideas and techniques to advance the EUROfusion Roadmap for fusion energy.

Lidija Radovanovic's interest in fusion research and her resulting desire to explore this topic in greater depth were sparked during her bachelor's degree. It was during an introductory physics lecture that she first heard about ITER. Since 2017, she has been part of Prof. Friedrich Aumayr's research group at TU Wien and is involved in EUROfusion with this group. She already dealt with the small ELM regime at ASDEX Upgrade as part of her master's thesis. She successfully completed her doctoral studies on the topic of “Exploring Pedestal Structure and Stability: Insight from Shaping and βpol Variations in ASDEX Upgrade” in the spring of this year.

The topic of her ERG project, entitled “Modeling the Pedestal in the Quasi-Continuous Exhaust Regime: Towards Predictive Understanding Across Devices”, will be a combination of her master's thesis and her PhD dissertation.

Future tokamak reactors are to be operated in the so-called “high-confinement mode” (H-mode). This refers to a highly efficient operating regime that achieves a significant improvement in energy confinement in the plasma. H-mode is characterised by a steep pressure gradient at the plasma edge, known as the pedestal. This is of crucial importance because, on the one hand, higher pedestal pressure can lead to a better fusion performance. On the other hand, it can also cause plasma instabilities, known as ELMs (edge localised modes). This can lead to energy and particle losses and further damage to the reactor wall. For these reasons, a good understanding, accurate prediction and precise control of the pedestal are essential, which requires models that can accurately capture the structure of the pedestal. Despite significant progress in pedestal modelling, there is a notable lack of dedicated models for predicting pedestals in ELM-free regimes, such as the so-called quasi-continuous exhaust (QCE) regime. The QCE is a regime that can be used to prevent larger and thus destructive instabilities. As part of her project, Lidija Radovanovic intends to address this issue and develop a predictive model for specifically QCE pedestals. This is particularly important for larger fusion facilities such as ITER and DEMO.