Dr. Annie Kritcher is a co-founder of Inertia Enterprises Inc. and a world-leading physicist in inertial confinement fusion. She served as integrated modeling lead and lead designer on the experiments that achieved the first laboratory burning plasma, fusion ignition, and fusion target gain producing more energy from fusion than went into the experiment. Dr. Kritcher earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan. She has authored and co-authored highly cited publications in Nature and Science.

She is a recipient of the Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellowship and the John Dawson Award for burning plasma design, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society for her role in achieving fusion ignition and target gain, and was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and Nature’s “Ten People Who Mattered in Science” in 2023.