Welcome to the first Fusion Energy Base Affiliate Interview!
In this sponsored series, we speak with leaders building the technology and infrastructure that will support a commercial fusion industry. This series aims to provide a clear look at our affiliates’ products and capabilities while helping foster new sales and partnerships.
To kick things off, we sat down with Zachary Hynek, co-founder of Morton Labs, to discuss the company’s current work and its long-term vision for accelerating fusion development.
Here is a brief overview of Morton Labs: Morton Labs, a Fusion Energy Base affiliate, is a new computational science company founded out of the University of Chicago. The company specializes in multi-physics simulation, digital-twin modeling, and AI integration specifically for fusion energy systems. Operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and fusion science, Morton Labs aims to become the central interoperability layer connecting research codes and simulation tools across national laboratories, universities, and private fusion ventures.
Can you briefly describe the founding story and mission of Morton Labs?
If you’re a research scientist in the fusion space, you know the pain that comes with trying to effectively simulate your experiments. It often feels like you need a PhD in computer science just to run some of these code bases. Morton Labs is a new venture spun out from the University of Chicago that is developing a multi-physics simulation platform specifically for fusion research.
Physicists want to focus on their experiments, not wrangling together complicated and disparate code bases. So we founded Morton Labs to be that computational arm, helping fusion companies and research institutions get fusion energy on the grid faster. And once they do, we empower them with AI-native and digital twin systems that streamline their work.
What are the core technologies behind Morton Labs, especially relating to multi-physics simulation, digital twin modeling, and their use in fusion and advanced energy systems?
Morton Labs helps serve as the software engineering backbone for fusion companies and research labs. The beauty behind our simulation platform is that it was tailored specifically for fusion energy research. Our focus is on bringing together a lot of the legacy systems and open-source codebases from national labs and universities. In other words, we’re making it easy for fusion researchers to tap into tools like OpenMC, WarpX, OpenFOAM, and others without needing to be expert software engineers themselves. We’re a platform-agnostic environment where our users can run multi-fidelity simulations on the HPC infrastructure that suits them best. This lets them focus on their physics and get the results they need without getting caught up in coding projects.
What makes your platform unique in addressing interoperability issues between research codes in fusion energy modeling?
So what really makes Morton Labs stand out is that we’ve done the heavy lifting of updating and integrating all those old Fortran codes to speak seamlessly with C++ and Python. We’ve built the SDKs and documentation so that fusion researchers don’t have to be software engineers just to get results. We’re also closely collaborating with national labs and the Fusion Energy Science Division to ensure our platform is benchmarked and validated. That means we’re not just creating a tool that physicists can use, but one that bridges the gap for the entire engineering and R&D team. It’s turnkey, platform-agnostic, and designed specifically for fusion. We’ve put in the work that most people aren’t too excited to do, and that’s what makes our platform unique.
What industries and use-cases are currently benefiting from Morton Labs’ technology either in energy or beyond?
Right now Morton Labs is just working within the fusion sector. An example would be Morton Labs is helping private fusion companies accelerate system design by creating a loosely coupled simulation workflow that links multiple physics domains involved in the first-wall problem.
We have separate modules that simulate the wall’s transient thermal response and the chamber gas behavior after the pulse, while an offline Direct Simulation Monte Carlo model predicts target heating and survival during injection. By coupling these models one-way we’re passing results between transport, thermal, and gas simulations without forcing them to run synchronously. This means Morton Labs enables research teams to explore thousands of design variations quickly, quantify uncertainty, and optimize parameters such as wall thickness, gas fill pressure, and target trajectory before expensive experiments are run.
Could you share the most significant milestones Morton Labs has recently achieved, especially your move to being revenue facing?
Just recently we were accepted to the NVIDIA Inception program, which is a really exciting milestone for us because we’re all about having access to the latest and greatest tech stack. We’ve been very deliberate about spending our efforts developing the platform and doing the work. I think it’s been our commitment to working so closely with the researchers and physicists who are running these simulations to address their needs and challenges that’s gotten us to win some key initial contracts.
But working through the licensing and partnership agreements to gain access to some of these code bases takes a lot of time and energy, so we’re excited to have done that work so our customers don’t have to. We’ll definitely be announcing some more strategic partnerships in the coming months.
What kind of customers and partners are you working with currently, and how do you support their research and business needs?
Our focus remains on fusion for the moment. We work with private fusion companies, public research institutions, universities, and national labs. Our goal is to help get fusion energy to the grid faster, safer and more economically. Whether they’re a private firm or a national lab, we support their research and business needs by providing the computational backbone they need to get results.
How does Morton Labs engage with organizations like national labs, universities, and private fusion companies?
The way we engage with fusion research teams is all about meeting them where they’re at. Whether they’ve been around for a few years or a few decades, we help them leverage the great work they’ve already done and prepare for that next iteration of their technology. This starts by sitting down with their leadership teams to understand their big-picture goals, timelines, and milestones.
Once we understand their specific design requirements (what they need to model, what software packages or codebases they rely on) we make sure they have the right frameworks, SDKs, and documentation in place. We’re also helping them build a roadmap to integrate AI and machine learning into their systems so they can move towards truly functional digital twin environments. And because we form these strategic private-public partnerships, we can take on some of that upfront complexity and cost of working with national labs. That way, our partners can move fast and focus on innovation rather than bureaucracy.
What is Morton Labs’ roadmap for future growth and scaling, both technologically and commercially?
We’re definitely focused on adding more and more software packages integrated and coupled within our system. But we’re also excited about some of the more collaborative projects we have going on right now. We’re excited to be sponsoring the Open Source Software for Fusion Energy (OSSFE) conference. We’re ironing out the details of a hackathon with partners like MIT and Proxima that’s going to be really exciting.
And that’s what we want. We want scientists to be excited about contributing to these incredible open source projects that are out there but to also offer a little direction of what initiatives are top priorities of private companies and the DOE. We also want grad students and researchers to hear about the work we’re doing and learn how they can get more involved.
On the commercial side, we want to help investors and the public really see how world-changing and safe this technology is through 3D simulations and visualizations.. Ultimately, it’s about scaling our technology and bringing more awareness and capital into the Fusion + AI ecosystem.
How do you approach product development, and what lessons have you learned about delivering customer-centric solutions?
Our approach to product development is really rooted in a customer-centric philosophy. Having built and exited other software companies in the AI sector, I’ve learned that no matter how technical we get (especially in the fusion community) there are always real people on the other end. We really prioritize listening to those users, whether they’re researchers or engineers, and making sure we’re meeting their highest-priority needs.
Because our team is nimble and we have strong ties to the university ecosystem, we can move fast while still validating our roadmap with real experimental feedback. In other words, we’re not just building a faster horse, we’re building a whole new car by letting researchers who’ve been in the field for years give us input and help shape the platform. That’s how we ensure we’re delivering something that truly fits the needs of the fusion community.
What are the biggest challenges Morton Labs is facing in the next 12-24 months, and how are you addressing them?
So one of our biggest challenges is that we’re not just coupling codebases, we’re coupling people. We’re working with a lot of different companies and national labs across an international ecosystem, and that means a lot of travel and logistical coordination. It’s a challenge making sure everyone’s on the same page and that we’re not redundant with other projects while also handling sensitive code.
But it’s also really exciting. We’re helping private fusion companies overcome their toughest hurdles, and we’re doing it side-by-side with them. Of course, balancing that travel with family life is always a challenge, but it’s worth it to be part of something that’s going to do amazing things for the fusion industry. So we’re addressing these challenges by staying flexible, keeping communication open, and making sure we’re delivering real value at every step.
Are there any exciting opportunities on the horizon, major partnerships, product launches, or research breakthroughs that you’d like to highlight?
One of the big opportunities we’re excited about is our growing partnership with NVIDIA and the consortium we’re building with multiple national labs. We’ll be down in Oak Ridge in the next few weeks, and we’re looking to formalize more working agreements so some of these labs can offload work to us. We’re already collaborating with key players at PPPL, Argonne, Idaho National Lab, Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge, and we’re really grateful for all of our technical advisors that we’re working with there.
Plus, we’ve got some exciting events coming up, like FusionX in Munich and the OSSFE conference happening back-to-back there. So we’ll be spending a lot of time in Germany, and maybe even getting a little skiing in on the side. It’s just really fun to be going through the journey as we push these partnerships and innovations forward.
Addressing the fusion hype-cycle directly?
We like to remind our sector that there’s still a lot of real scientific work ahead. It’s not just about the buzz words or hype; it’s about reaching key milestones that once hit signify to investors that commercializing fusion energy is a real, financially lucrative opportunity.
Sometimes our own scientists hallucinate more than these models do when forecasting timelines for getting fusion on the grid, and we don’t want to add to noise. We’re focused on the hard stuff and deploying meaningful technology that offers real impact today. Benchmarking, verification and validation efforts so that our results can be trusted. So that’s why we’ve taken the approach that we have.
To learn more about Morton Labs and developing fusion digital twin systems, contact [email protected] or visit their website.
