Professor Miklos Porkolab received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1967, and thereafter joined the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory where he rose to the position of Senior Research Physicist and Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Astrophysical Sciences Department in 1975. While at Princeton University, Professor Porkolab carried out pioneering experimental research in the area of nonlinear wave-wave and wave-particle interactions, parametric instabilities and high power RF wave-plasma interactions in tokamak fusion plasmas.

Professor Porkolab spent 1976 at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany, under the auspices of the Humboldt Foundation as a winner of the "US Senior Scientist Award." In 1977, he joined MIT as a professor in the Physics Department and since then he has led several pioneering experiments in radio frequency heating and noninductive current drive on the Versator II, and the Alcator C and C-Mod tokamaks. For this work, Professor Porkolab shared the 1984 American Physical Society Excellence in Plasma Research Award (now the John Dawson Award).

From 1991–2001 he served as Editor of Physics Letters A, Plasma Physics and Fluid Dynamics subsection. He also represented the U. S. Plasma Physics community for six years on the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Commission–16 (Plasma Physics) (1991-1997). From 1992–95, he served as a member of the National Research Council Subpanel on Plasma Science. In 1999, he served as Chair, Plasma Physics Division, American Physical Society.

Professor Porkolab is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2007 he was awarded The Karoly Simony Memorial Plaque and Prize by the Hungarian Nuclear Society. In 2009 Prof. Porkolab won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize of the American Physical Society. In 2010 Prof Porkolab was awarded the Fusion Power Associates Distinguished Career Award. In 2013 Professor Porkolab was awarded the Hannes Alfvén Prize of the European Physical Society. In 2016 he was elected as an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Professor Porkolab's current research interests include experimental and theoretical studies of plasma turbulence and transport as well as measuring RF waves with phase contrast imaging techniques in high temperature tokamak plasmas. Other topics of interest include magnetic reconnection studies in laboratory plasmas as well as inertial-confinement fusion.

From 1995 to 2014, he was the Director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT.