Supervisory Board
Giorgio ANANIA
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Giorgio spent 40 years in senior management at high-tech companies, from start-ups to multinationals in the US, UK, France and Germany, including major operations in China (2,000 staff). He 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 memories, and board member at PhotonDelta (a NL photonics fund) and LinkinVax (France). Previously, he was founder and CEO at Aledia, a developer of an entirely new display technology using LEDs, and CEO of Bookham (now part of Lumentum), then the number 2 worldwide in telecom lasers. He was also Chairman of Sicoya, sold in 2021, and of Cube Optics, sold in 2015, and a founder and board member of the European public-private partnership Photonics21. 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”.
Philippe VERCHERIN
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Philippe is Investment Director at Crédit Mutuel Impact since 2020.
He focuses on investments in innovative companies with high environmental impact and in infrastructure for the energy transition.
He previously spent eight years at VINCI, a world leader in concessions, energy and construction, financing major highway and railway projects through public-private partnerships.
Philippe holds a Master of Science in civil engineering from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and an MBA from Collège des Ingénieurs.
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.
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.
Executives
Francesco VOLPE
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Francesco heated, diagnosed and stabilized fusion plasmas and liquid metals by microwaves and/or magnetic perturbations in 6 countries. For his PhD on “Electron Bernstein Waves” in Wendelstein 7-AS he received the 2003 Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Gesellschaft. After a stint in Culham, UK, he spent several years in the USA, eventually as an Associate Professor at Columbia University, New York. He was the first to stabilize a “Locked Mode” -the main cause of tokamak disruptions (2011 DOE Early Career Award)- and made major contributions to stellarator simplification (2015 Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award). As one of few physicists who worked on stellarators, tokamaks, spherical tokamaks and reversed field pinches, he concluded that HTS stellarators with liquid walls are the most viable, efficient reactors, but they need to be simplified, shrunk and made economically attractive. With that in mind, he pursued an Executive MBA from ESCP Europe, and in 2020 he co-founded Renaissance Fusion in Grenoble, France.
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
Domenico D'ANDREA
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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.
Marion Hudson
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Marion started her career in 2007 in bp in UK where she held various technical lead roles in Product development and deployment. She developed and launched many of the Castrol lubricants products in Europe working with multi-disciplinaries and multi nationals’ teams. She then joined Tokamak Energy on its Fusion mission in 2020 where as a programme and portfolio manager she implemented its PMO, recruiting the team and put in place an Agile framework to project management whilst delivering its AMR programme funded by UK government. After 17 years in UK, Marion joined Renaissance Fusion to do a similar role and bring her skills to the team and its ambitious business plan.
Danilo LONGO
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During his PhD, earned in 2019 at Sorbonne University, Danilo studied the interaction between magnetic molecules and ultra-thin superconducting films of lead (Pb) by scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. He subsequently joined the DEIMOS beamline at the SOLEIL synchrotron to investigate molecular magnetism and its interaction with superconducting substrates by X-ray magnetic circular dichroism. In 2021 he moved to CIC nanoGUNE to upgrade a commercial scanning tunneling microscope and detect the first electron spin resonance (ESR-STM) signal in Spain from individual atomic spin qubits on ultra-thin oxide layers, which he achieved in 2023. In 2024 he joined Renaissance Fusion and accepted the challenge of manufacturing the world's widest HTS tapes.
Nathaniel BAKER
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Nathaniel is an experimentalist in fluid mechanics. He earned his PhD in 2017 from the University of Grenoble (FR) and Coventry University (UK). For that, he experimentally showed that liquid metal turbulence subject to strong magnetic fields can sustain inverse energy transfers at scales which are topologically 3D (see PRL article). As a post-doc at ONERA (the French aerospace laboratory), he benchmarked a novel method to reconstruct the full pressure field from tomographic velocity measurements alone. He joined Renaissance Fusion in 2021 when the lab was still an empty hall. He made major contributions to the Skyfall series of experiments in meter-size cylindrical chambers and was promoted to Group Leader in 2023 and Head in 2025.
Victor PROST
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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!
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.
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
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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!