Francesco SciortinoCo Founder

Germany - Munich, Bavaria

I am a co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a fusion energy startup based in Munich, spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. At Proxima, we are working towards fusion power plants based on quasi-isodynamic stellarators. We see Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the most advanced stellarator in the world, as showing the clearest and most robust path to fusion energy. I believe that Europe has tremendous advantages when it comes to stellarator R&D, and that successful innovation requires not only creativity but also courage to break with the status quo.

I completed my PhD in plasma physics and fusion energy at MIT in 2021. My PhD research focused on the Alcator C-Mod and DIII-D tokamaks in the USA, particularly on the application of reduced models, optimization and Bayesian inference for fusion. After my PhD, I joined the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik in Germany, working on divertor spectroscopy and numerical optimization on the ASDEX-Upgrade tokamak and the W7-X stellarator. During this time, I was one of the European Scientific Coordinators for experimental research on negative triangularity tokamak scenarios.

I previously worked on research projects at the MAGPIE Z-pinch facility at Imperial College London (UK), at the TCV tokamak at EPFL (Switzerland), at the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (USA), and at the APEX-D facility at the MPI-IPP (Germany).