Francesco (PhD 2003 Greifswald, MBA 2019 ESCP Europe) is an applied physicist and an entrepreneur. He heated, diagnosed, and stabilized fusion plasmas and liquid metals by means of microwaves and/or magnetic perturbations. He did so on the Wendelstein 7-AS stellarator, the DIII-D tokamak and several other experimental devices in 6 countries, concluding that simplified HTS stellarators with liquid walls are the shortest road to net fusion energy, but they need to be simplified and shrunk. With that in mind, in 2020 he moved to Grenoble, France, and co-founded Renaissance Fusion – a 90-people strong company that raised €60M.