Board of Directors
Giorgio ANANIA
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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 currently Chairman of Intrinsic semiconductor (UK), a developer of next-generation semiconductor memory, and is a board member at PhotonDelta (a NL photonics fund) and LinkinVax (France). Previously, he was founder /CEO at Aledia, a developer of an entirely new technology for making displays using LEDs, where he raised over $300M in financing, and before that he was CEO of Bookham (now part of Lumentum), then the number 2 worldwide in telecom lasers, which he grew from a start-up into a $250 million/year NASDAQ- and LSE-listed public company. He was also Chairman of Sicoya, sold in 2021, and of Cube Optics, sold in 2015. He was also one of the founders, and for 12 years a board member, of the Photonics21 European public-private partnership in photonics. 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”.
Francesco VOLPE
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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.
Sylvie RICHARD
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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.
Martin KUPP
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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.
Clea KOLSTER
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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.
Executives
Francesco VOLPE
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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.
Philippe LAMOTTE
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After studying finance and accounting in the south of France and obtaining his Master’s degree, Philippe held various international management positions in the nuclear industry. In 2000 he restructured a mid-size company in Germany. In 2006 he became ERP Program Director and introduced project management techniques in the finance core model of Framatome. Back to Germany in 2011, he took the position of Corporate Controller at the Enrichment Technology Company, which develops and manufactures centrifuges. Philippe then joined the Olkiluoto 3 project as CFO and spent more than four years in Finland focusing on stabilizing the project, before moving back to France in 2018 to become Finance and Procurement Head of the ITER Organization. Philippe joined Renaissance Fusion in 2024.
Diego CAMMARANO
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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 .
Linkedin
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
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Stefano BERNARDI
Investor @ Unruly Capital & Smallholding, Scout @ Atomico
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Pjotr VAN SCHOTHORST
Investor @ PVS Investments
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Gijs Van der HULST
Founding Partner @ Positron Ventures
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Damien PACCARD
Director of Finance @ STMicroelectronics
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Business Advisors
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Ezio DAL MASO
Senior Associate @ Stephenson Harwood
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Emmanuel ORTIZ
General Manager @ Three O Construction, formerly @ GE Vernova
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Diane OUANDJI
Manager @ KPMG Canada
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Technical Advisors
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Kazunobu NAGASAKI
Professor @ Kyoto University
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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 60 people from 19 nationalities.
We need bold doers & builders. We need you!