Francesco Sciortino Email and Phone Number

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).