Francesco Sciortino is Co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a Munich-based startup that aims to bring stellarators and their promise of clean, safe and abundant fusion energy to market. He studied physics at Imperial College London, did his master’s thesis at the TCV tokamak at EPFL in Switzerland, and completed his PhD at MIT before working on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak at the Max Planck Society and becoming inspired by the W7-X stellarator experiment. In January 2023, he co-founded Proxima Fusion, the first-ever spin-out company from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. Proxima is designing the first generation of fusion power plants using quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators—the clearest, most robust path to commercial fusion.