Outside of my interest in plasma accelerators, I was also intrigued by fusion energy, especially with the famous achievement of ignition at the National Ignition Facility around this time. Therefore in my exchange year at MIT, I worked at the High Energy Density Physics group at the MIT PSFC under the guidance of Dr. Maria Gatu Johnson. My project involves using the particle-in-cell code EPOCH to investigate the origin of unexpected ion energy modulations observed by the Magnetic Recoil Spectrometer (MRS) at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This is important because the MRS diagnoses the key implosion parameters at NIF, and modulations can affect these inferred values.