Editor’s note:
While some may have heard, here and there, names of other big, reputable student-led engineering projects such as Sunswift Racing or Mending Broken Hearts Club, AtomCraft is yet to get the spotlight they deserve.
Earlier this year, I sat down with its president and two of its team members. What follows is our attempt to put into words their burdens and joys, their achievements and setbacks, and the abundant of memories they will carry long after their time at AtomCraft.
To our readers, and those mostly studying within the Humanitarian or Arts fields, you might find this to be an interesting but almost foreign read. May your horizons be broadened.
– Yunya (Features Director at Gamamari)
The same process that powers the sun could one day power your home, and the ones helping to build it are potentially fellow students next to you in the study lounge.
The idea behind AtomCraft is precisely that. A student-based project quietly finessing something no undergraduate cohort has done before – designing, constructing and operating their own tokamak.
AtomCraft was launched in the January of 2024 with just 15 students. Since then, the team has grown rapidly into a multidisciplinary blur of talent spanning physics, engineering, and beyond. By early 2025, that number had ballooned to 75 members and stakeholders. Their device, SOUTH (Student Operated University Tokamak) has already hit a series of milestones that most research teams take years to reach: first plasma in September 2024, a successfully modelled null field the following month, and a glow discharge cleaning plasma achieved in the beginning of 2025.
Earlier in the first term, I had the pleasure of interviewing Roshween (Rosh) Riar, Caroline Lee, and Amy Ling. In respective order, their roles are AtomCraft’s president/business lead, safety manager, and team lead for Vacuum and Fuelling.
Having a liberal arts-ridden brain, speaking with students like them was as insightful as you can get into their world. What was particularly remarkable was not the scientific sustenance of it all, rather, the deeper nuances, emotions and fulfilment such a project holds for these three young women. Along with becoming familiar with the technical wonders of it all, our conversation flowed from the difficulties of balancing studies while being at the frontline of AtomCraft work, to the social barriers and doubts faced between student projects and real scientific research, and to the socio-politics surrounding women in STEM.
If we look through the lens of the journey, and not the destination, the conversation immediately took the turn of being far less interested in talking about the machine than they are in talking about it cost to get here – and what it gave them back. But all of it, by any measure, is nothing short of extraordinary.
Upon meeting Rosh, I was instantly captivated by her demanding nature and the passion coursing through her voice as she spoke of AtomCraft. A fourth year studying aerospace engineering, Riar has been part of it all since her second year and has proudly watched the project sprout from a founding cohort of fifteen into something of a start-up. “All big projects, all things that change the world,” she confesses, “start from training up students that will carry the knowledge they learn from this into the workplace.”
Images: Supplied
The ambition of what they’re building is, truthfully, staggering. The vacuum vessel is the steel ‘heart’ of the tokamak and must be mechanically polished, chemically cleaned, and plasma-treated before use, because air, in this context, is considered ‘dirty’. “I get the system ready,” Ling says. “There’s a lot of electrical systems that then confine the hydrogen gas and create the environment of fusion without actually fusing molecules together.”
This distinction matters as Australia currently does not legally allow fusion at the undergraduate level. What the team is doing is demonstrating that they can operate a gas line, create the right conditions, and integrate the systems. “We are not having any energy output,” Riar says. “We’re just replicating the environment for fusion to happen.” It is proof that they understand concepts and safety protocols, and it is a hard win once they enter the workforce. “Although we are not doing fusion, we are building the actual machine that could do fusion,” Ling says. “We have thought about the actual physics side. We have thought about the operability. It is not just knowing how the plasma physics works.”
The field of plasma physics, fusion energy and anything touching the nuclear is exclusive to postgraduate research. “You would need a master’s degree to officially be involved in professional nuclear research,” she says. What AtomCraft is doing is bringing it down so that undergraduates can also get a taste. “It’s kind of the magic of making students do really hard things,” Riar says. “You learn so much out of doing something that’s somewhat impossible.”
The project sits within UNSW’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) scheme – year-long, credit bearing industry experience programs that is an option alongside industry experience – and is led by nuclear engineering expert Associate Professor Patrick Burr. Lee reflects on this area. “The premise of AtomCraft is to promote education in fields where these VIP projects have not touched yet,” she says. Most of UNSW’s VIP project courses are centred around biomedical or mechanical engineering. It became quick to note that nothing existed for nuclear physics or high-power plasma work. “And for me as a chemical engineer,” Ling adds, “there was no VIP that really applied to what I was doing other than AtomCraft. It’s the most multidisciplinary project you can find.”
The feeling of misplacement for women in STEM fields has long been a pressing matter. While university enrolments are growing, women still comprise only 15% of the STEM workforce. It’s difficult not to feel lost amidst a project crowded mostly by men. All three of them speak on the imposter syndrome they have felt at one point or another. “I was in Coil Control where it was mostly Electrical majors and I was the only girl on the team,” Lee says. “And in that case, it’s pretty difficult because we all think differently.” However, Riar considers the women in their team luckier than other environments. “I do feel like I’m very feminine in the group, though none of these men are malicious,” she says. “But when I first joined, I definitely felt intimidated.”
She goes on to reminisce the early ‘baby’ days when she did not know how to operate the lathe or laser print, and feeling, by the basics of manufacturing, like she was already behind her older, male teammates. “I felt like I was less of an engineer because I didn’t know how to manufacture,” she says. “But technical skills can be taught. One thing people can never take away from you is your work ethic.”
Riar soon realised that taking on a business lead was harder to defend. “There definitely are engineers who’d say, oh, so you’re an engineer who’s going to be a business consultant. And they’d look down on you for that,” she says. “At some point it really did hurt me. But sometimes you just have to grow thick skin. Management is a part of engineering. Learning how to operate a deeply technical business is itself an engineering lesson. It doesn’t really matter what flavour of engineering you pick. The thing that applies throughout all of it is how to problem solve, and to what constraints.”
At times, such work offers no clear right or wrong answers. Knowing that your ground mattered more than knowing everyone else’s was something to be learnt quickly. “A big thing is to never be afraid to be yourself, and to be courageous,” Riar says. “If you speak up, something will happen. And if you speak up and they don’t do anything about it, then you’ve walked into the wrong place.”
The ship isn’t as steady as it seems nor is anything straightforward. Ling didn’t expect just how fast she had to adapt when she first joined. Her chemical engineering cohort had an unusually high proportion of women. “I had been shielded from the gender imbalance,” she says. Then AtomCraft put her into what she believes as a more realistic workspace. She became team lead in her second term, one of very few women in management. There were moments where she had to lead the meetings with very physics-heavy and technical talk. “Their brains move a lot faster sometimes and I’m just there worrying if I said something wrong or missed something…,” she says. “Sitting in a room where they’re discussing physics, and I’m a chemical engineer who hasn’t touched physics since high school,” she adds on.
What changed was coming to the epiphany that her knowledge and skills had their own asset. “There were things that were not being done properly because they didn’t have a chemical engineer. That soon made me gain my voice a lot more,” she says. “My part in the whole system is the before and after. It may not be the big, exciting bit in the middle, but my bit means the middle bit can actually happen.”
As it turns out, this hardly differs from what the tokamak itself requires. The machine needs the right conditions before we see progress happen. The students building it have seemed to have constructed something similar within themselves – a stable environment, held up by time management and rigorous commitment, without which the whole project collapses. “It’s no different to any course,” Ling says. “You choose how much you put in, but how much you put in is how much you get out.”
For now, though, these girls have a career to build and sustain. Their different backgrounds that drew them into AtomCraft have all ended with the same outcome – growing to love and appreciate it. “I got lost in my degree and didn’t see why I was doing this. I then joined AtomCraft and easily picked up a nuclear minor,” Ling says. What’s further noteworthy is finding a true passion for the work. “I only have one shot in my life to do a project like this. Might as well do it,” Riar says. “It’s like a lot of Lego lovers – they love to build these tough Star Wars lego spaceships like the Millennium Falcon. And I think that’s kind of what AtomCraft is. It’s just for the love of the game.”
AtomCraft is currently accepting applications from students across all faculties for Term 3 2026. For more information, visit atomcraft.com.au.