BY ADRIAN JIMENEZ

Meet Hong Sio, a MIT graduate student and WCHS alumni who does research at an accelerator facility at MIT and measures nuclear products from fusion reactions to understand what happens during an Inertial Confinement Fusion, or an ICF, process. In layman’s terms, he’s a pretty big deal.

“At the simplest level, we fill a tiny capsule with fusion fuel and fire many lasers at it simultaneously, compressing and heating the fuel. The hotter and more dense the fuel becomes, the more fusion reactions are generated,” Sio said.

Sio’s overall goal in doing his work from looking at ICF processes and many more experiments is to research and try to understand what happens when lasers meet other substances, but it has been a long road to get there.

“I spent 120 days in hotel rooms last year,” he said. “Four months on the road.” Sio’s life is full of traveling, from coming to the US with his family from Macau, China. One important place he went to was UC Irvine. He gives thanks to that university for his interest in fusion, a topic he found could be a powerful energy source.

“Touring that facility made an impression on me. It made me think about how we generate electricity thirty to fifty years from now,” Sio said. And here he is, actively working towards that future while still remembering his past as a Bulldog.

“He was a very good student… He was well prepared and knowledgeable in the topics he was already supposed to be knowledgeable in,” AP Physics teacher Fred Myers said. Myers had Hong for AP physics and thought of him as a great student.

“I remember my time at WCHS as a time when I was interested in every subject and surrounded by teachers eager to share their excitement with me. Mr. Myers’s physics class started me down my path today, and I recall being absorbed in US history through Mr. Evans’ empathetic storytelling. In Mr. Beck’s Academic Decathlon team, I learned how to study; in Mr. Beeken’s class, I learned that sometimes you get what you need,” Sio said.