People

Meet our teams

Board of Directors

Giorgio ANANIA

  • Giorgio has spent 40 years in senior management at high-tech companies, from start-ups to multinationals in the US, UK, France and Germany, including with major operations in China (2,000 staff). He has led three IPOs and raised over $1.7 billion in public and private financing. He is Chairman and CEO at Aledia, a developer of an entirely new technology for making displays using LEDs, and VP of the European public-private partnership Photonics21. Previously he was CEO of Bookham (now Oclaro), number 2 worldwide in telecom lasers, which he grew from a start-up into a $250 million/year NASDAQ- and LSE-listed public company, Chairman of Sicoya, sold in 2021 to Chinese investors, and of Cube Optics, sold to Huber & Suhner in 2015. Giorgio has an M.A. in physics from Oxford University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University, with a thesis on the “Equilibrium and Stability of Stellarators”.

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Francesco VOLPE

  • Francesco is a physicist and has been passionate about fusion since the age of 16. He dedicated his studies to heating, diagnosing and stabilizing fusion plasmas and liquid metals. For his research, he received the 2003 Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, the 2011 DOE Early Career Award and the 2015 Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award. Having worked on all major magnetic fusion concepts, he came to the conclusion that simplified stellarators are the north star and a start-up is the way to reach it. After earning his Executive MBA at ESCP Europe, he co-founded Renaissance Fusion in 2020.

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Clea KOLSTER

  • Clea is a Partner and the Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital. She previously worked with electricity resource planning models and economy-wide decarbonization plans for entire states, utilities, and asset owners at San Francisco-based energy consulting firm E3 (see for example this report and this). She also co-founded her own company focused on access to clean cooking fuels in West Africa, having previously worked on clean energy access and investment in East and North Africa. Clea earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering and energy policy at Imperial College London, with a thesis on the techno-economics of carbon capture, transport networks, and sequestration in the subsurface.

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Sylvie RICHARD

  • Sylvie holds a master's degree in nuclear engineering from ENSTA Paris, and an Executive MBA from IMD Lausanne. Sylvie began her career as a neutronics engineer at EDF. She then held management positions in nuclear plants until taking over the management of the Tricastin power plant (4 reactors of 900 MWe). After being deputy director of the nuclear production division (56 EDF reactors in France and 2 engineering centers - 23,000 employees), she is, since April 2022, in charge of the French nuclear fleet Long Term Operation Program overseeing major maintenance and modifications, for an annual CAPEX budget of 4.7 billion euros.

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Simon BELKA

  • Simon holds a master’s in mechanical engineering from the Paristech School, Ecole Nationale des Ponts & Chaussées, and an Executive MBA from ESCP. Simon started his career as an engineer at Airbus & Renault. He then worked as a project manager on several industrialization projects of the Airbus A350 program. Simon then moved to several executive positions such as Bid & Projects Director, Strategy & Marketing Director at Ascent Integration, General manager of a business line at Atlas Copco. He finally joined Renaissance Fusion in February 2022. 

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Founders & Executives

Francesco VOLPE

  • Francesco is a physicist and has been passionate about fusion since the age of 16. He dedicated his studies to heating, diagnosing and stabilizing fusion plasmas and liquid metals. For his research, he received the 2003 Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, the 2011 DOE Early Career Award and the 2015 Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award. Having worked on all major magnetic fusion concepts, he came to the conclusion that simplified stellarators are the north star and a start-up is the way to reach it. After earning his Executive MBA at ESCP Europe, he co-founded Renaissance Fusion in 2020.

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Martin KUPP

  • Martin is a Professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the ESCP Business School, Paris and at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), Berlin. He has had a passion for deeptech entrepreneurship ever since meeting Francesco for the first time in 2019. Martin’s research focuses on entrepreneurial decision-making, venture scaling and team dynamics in deeptech ventures.

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Diego CAMMARANO

  • Diego Cammarano joined Renaissance Fusion as its first employee in March 2021, where he is now the COO. Always looking for ways to put his skills at the service of the others, he has previously held field positions in several medical projects at Dasit spa and IBA. Diego holds an MBA from ESMT Berlin, an MSc in Nuclear engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan and an MSc in Industrial engineering from École Centrale Paris .

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Simon BELKA

Technical & Business Leaders

Alexander USOSKIN

  • Alexander’s current research interests include the development of consistent methods for processing large-area REBCO coated tapes on an industrial scale, and the investigation of mechanisms responsible for current interchange between the superconductors and normal-metals in the conductor structure. His other interests involve studying film-growth mechanisms, mechanisms of formation of laser-induced surface morphologies, and the optics of semiconductor-based composites. He has 35-year experience in the development of HTS film technologies and authored about 350 publications and 80 patents.

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Patricia JOHNSON

  • Patricia (PhD UC Berkeley) formed and led high-tech development teams across the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades. Her work in materials science broke new ground in consumer electronics, test and measurement instruments at Hewlett Packard, Agilent Technologies and FormFactor, and self-powered ingestible sensors and medical implants at Google X, Johnson & Johnson and Proteus Digital Health. Her expertise includes advanced multilayer thin films, ductile intermetallic compounds and MEMs. She contributed to superconductivity research and mechanical equations of state at CNRS Grenoble. She joined Renaissance to focus on HTS developments essential for compact fusion energy.

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Eric FAVRE

  • Eric has been the Managing Director of the French subsidiary of COMSOL since 2001. As such, he has overseen a team of 30+ people in editing scientific computing software, as well as helping his users to get the most out of the software in many different areas of applications. Before that, his work consisted of modeling MHD and induction heating devices for the steel industry. He holds a PhD from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, with a thesis on experimental fluid dynamics (Marangoni convection). Eric has been leading the Liquid Metal Team at Renaissance Fusion since June 2023, developing cutting edge technologies for the success of clean energy.

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Domenico D'ANDREA

  • Domenico held various positions with Air Liquide for more than 30 years in France and abroad. Starting at Vernon on the Ariane 5 cryogenic rocket engine, he was then appointed Product Manager for the microelectronics and chemical industries. After that, he embarked on a 7-year expatriation to Shanghai as General Manager, successfully establishing the Asian Advanced Technologies branch, expanding business operations, and fostering collaborations in new markets. Back in France, Domenico actively contributed to international fusion projects for Big Science. He joined Renaissance Fusion in 2022 to fulfill his dream of working on Fusion by leading the business development and sales team.

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Victor PROST

  • Victor joined Renaissance Fusion in 2021 after earning his engineering diploma from Ecole Polytechnique and PhD at MIT on machine design and structural optimization. He has worked on a wide range of projects, from prosthetics to high performance car engines and wave energy harvesting machines, resulting in 4 patents and 11 publications. Starting with the early days of Renaissance Fusion, Victor has completed major published works on stellarator system optimization, blanket and neutronics design, and multiple magnet prototypes. He has grown along with the company and the teams and is now dedicated to realizing fusion energy!

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Business Operation Team

HTS Team

Fusion Engineering Teams

Fusion Science Team

Liquid Metal Team

The on-site Renaissance Fusion team proudly works with remote and visiting, world-class advisors and collaborators.

Strategic Commitee

Business Advisors

Technical Advisors

  • Frédéric BROCHARD

    Research Director @ Institut Jean Lamour (IJL) | LinkedIn

  • Kazunobu NAGASAKI

    Professor @ Kyoto University

  • Sergei SMOLENTSEV

    Distinguished R&D Staff Member @ ORNL

We are also very grateful to Francesca BOMBARDA (ENEA) and to Stewart PRAGER (PPPL) and Ron PRATER (General Atomics), now both retired, for having advised Renaissance Fusion during its first steps.

Collaborators in Europe

Collaborators in the USA

Are you a University, National Lab or private company developing top-notch Fusion, HTS, Liquid Metals and related technologies?

Join the cause! Contact us at collaborate@renfusion.eu

We are lucky to work or have worked with amazing, energetic students:

Are you a gifted, resourceful student seeking a research project of 6 months or longer?
Contact us at jobs@renfusion.eu or check the FuseNet matchmaking site!

Last but absolutely not the least

We work relentlessly every day to make fusion smaller, faster, cheaper, safer and simpler. We use creativity, agility, originality, passion and hard work, to continuously improve.

We need future rockstars to join our team of 57 people from 15 nationalities.

We need bold doers & builders. We need you!