Linda Ellen Sugiyama is an American plasma physicist, a research affiliate in the High Energy Plasma Physics Group of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,^[1] where she earned her PhD in 1980 under the joint supervision of Chia-Chiao Lin and Bruno Coppi.^[2]

Sugiyama's research has included the development of computer simulations to model the effects of breakdowns of plasma confinement in tokamaks,^[3] and to model plasma density snakes, a common type of instability in confined plasma.^[4] With Wallace Manheimer and Thomas H. Stix, she is co-editor of the book Plasma Science And The Environment (American Institute of Physics, 1997), on the applications of plasma in environmental engineering.

Sugiyama was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2004, after a nomination from the APS Division of Plasma Physics, "for contributions to the development of numerical simulation for the study of basic questions in plasma physics and the inter-relationship between the numerical and analytical approaches to plasma theory".^[5]