Dr. Francesco Sciortino is CEO and Co-founder of Proxima Fusion. Francesco has spent nearly a decade working at the cutting edge of fusion, spanning groundbreaking work on tokamaks during his PhD in plasma physics and fusion energy at MIT and later at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), where he also acted as one of the European coordinators for tokamak research. It was at IPP that Francesco progressively shifted his focus from tokamaks to stellarators, recognizing breakthroughs in stellarator research in 2022 and defining a new path to faster commercialization of fusion energy.