The Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) observes and informs the trajectory and decisions taken by Renaissance Fusion, to help guide the startup toward the creation of its simplified stellarator and the realization of fusion. Its members are internationally renowned professionals specializing in our three technology pillars: fusion science, HTS, and liquid metals.
Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee
Fusion Science experts
Raul SANCHEZ
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Raul Sanchez is Full Professor in the Physics Department and a member of the Plasma Physics Group at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), SPAIN. He has held several academic leadership positions at UC3M, including Vice-Chancellor for Undergraduate Studies (2011-2015) and Head of the Physics Department (2018-2023), and is currently the local director of the Erasmus Mundus Master Programme in Nuclear Fusion and Physics Engineering (FUSION-EP), coordinated by Aix-Marseille University.
His research focuses on the physics of magnetically confined plasmas for fusion energy, in both tokamaks and stellarators. He has contributed to the design and optimization of compact stellarators; developed widely used MHD codes for equilibrium (SIESTA, FLIPEC) and stability (COBRA) calculations in three-dimensional configurations; studied runawayelectron dynamics in tokamaks; and carried out extensive work on plasma turbulence and turbulent transport, with particular emphasis on dynamics near marginal stability. He has also explored advanced numerical methods for plasma simulation, including parareal techniques and SPH algorithms.
Prof. Sanchez spent part of his career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) as a postdoctoral researcher (1998-99) and later as a senior staff member (2004-10) of the Fusion Energy Division, and was an Affiliate Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (2006- 20). He maintains broad international collaborations and has been an ITER Research Fellow since 2016. He has published over 120 refereed papers, authored two books on plasma turbulence, and delivered more than 30 invited talks. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2017 and received the Miguel Catalan Award in Sciences for scientists younger than 40 in 2009.
Ralf KAISER
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Ralf Kaiser is an experimental nuclear physicist, former Head of the Physics Section at the IAEA and founder of an award-winning high-tech startup company.
He studied Physics and Mathematics at the University of Münster, Germany, and obtained his PhD in experimental High Energy Physics from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, based on research carried out at the Canadian National Laboratory TRIUMF. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the German National Laboratory DESY in Hamburg, he was appointed to a faculty position in the Nuclear Physics Group at the University of Glasgow in 2001. For almost 20 years his research was focused on the fundamental structure of matter and on the design and construction of the detectors required for this research.
In 2010 he joined the IAEA as Head of the Physics Section, responsible for the IAEA programmes on Accelerator Applications, Nuclear Instrumentation and Nuclear Fusion. In this role he represented the Agency on the ITER and SESAME Councils. After the accident in Fukushima, he participated in a series of Missions to Fukushima, as leader and expert member, and he led the development of a UAV-based radiation monitoring and mapping system for Fukushima Prefecture.
In 2016 he founded Lynkeos Technology as a spin-off from the University of Glasgow, to commercialise the use of cosmic-ray muon imaging for nuclear waste containers. Lynkeos has deployed the first CE-marked muon imaging system at Sellafield in the UK in 2018, and has won a series of awards including the 2018 Institute of Physics Business StartUp Award. Ralf is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 2020.
Rogerio JORGE
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Rogerio Jorge is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His previous appointment was at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Portugal, where he was an Invited Assistant Professor and Junior Researcher. He was the Principal Investigator of an EUROfusion’s Enabling Research Grant and an FCT CEEC Grant at the Junior Researcher level, 2021 edition.
Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Greifswald, Germany, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow. From 2019-2021 he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is interested in the study of plasmas for fusion energy and in the description of three-dimensional magnetic fields.
Rogerio obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Engineering Physics at IST, Lisbon (Portugal), and his Ph.D. at IST and EPFL, Lausanne (Switzerland) under the IST-EPFL Joint Doctoral Initiative. For his Ph.D. thesis, which obtained a unanimous jury classification of Pass with Distinction and Honour, he received the 2020 EPS-PPD Ph.D. Research Award and the EPFL Physics Doctoral Thesis Award.
He is also a member of the “Simons Collaboration on Hidden Symmetries and Fusion Energy”, the first Simons Foundation Mathematical and Physical Sciences Award supporting fusion science that has been granted to an international team of scientists and mathematicians from eight U.S. universities and four international institutions. Rogerio also is also an invited columnist at the newspaper “Observador”, writing about science, technology, and the economy.
Kazunobu NAGASAKI
Liquid Metals experts
Sergey SMOLENSTEV
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Sergey Smolentsev obtained his Ph.D. in Thermophysics from Leningrad Polytechnic University (Russia) in 1990 and completed postdoctoral research on instabilities in liquid metal MHD flows at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) under Prof. Hermann Branover. From 1990, he served as Assistant and Associate Professor at St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, and in 1998 joined the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a researcher.
Sergey has acted as task leader, coordinator, and developer in numerous national and international fusion technology projects, including the Advanced Power Extraction Study (APEX, 1998–2003), ITER Test Blanket Module (2003–2012), US–Japan JUPITER/TITAN collaboration on liquid breeders (2001–2012), US–India collaboration on liquid-metal MHD and heat transfer for PbLi blankets (2015–2017), and Fusion Engineering System Studies/Fusion Nuclear Science Facility in the United States (2015–present). As project leader in a collaboration with EUROfusion (2015–2019), he led the design and construction of the unique Magnetohydrodynamic PbLi Experiment (MaPLE) facility at UCLA.
He is currently a Distinguished R&D Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working on breeding blankets, fuel cycle technologies, liquid-metal plasma-facing components, and computational tools for fusion cooling and breeding applications. His work has resulted in more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and one monograph, with an H-index of 45. Sergey serves as editor of the FLUIDS journal.
Angel IBARRA
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Angel Ibarra has a PhD in Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has worked for more than 35 years in different aspects related to technological problems of fusion as an energy source, with special emphasis on those aspects related to materials and their response to radiation. For more than 15 years he has led the Fusion Technologies Division of the National Fusion Laboratory of CIEMAT, and has been responsible for the Spanish participation in the IFMIF/EVEDA project in the framework of the Bilateral Agreement between Europe and Japan for the Broader Approach to Fusion, European coordinator of the Work Package of the Early Neutron Source (WPENS) for Fusion in the framework of the European Consortium EUROfusion and in 2021 he has been appointed Director of the IFMIF-DONES España Consortium.
He has published more than 200 articles and is a member of several national and international committees.
HTS experts
Milan RADOVIC
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Milan Radović is a senior scientist at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland, and an adjunct professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
He leads research on quantum materials with a focus on emergent phenomena in oxide heterostructures. His work explores electronic and magnetic properties
at reduced dimensionality and interfaces, including interfacial superconductivity, magnetism, and low-dimensional electronic systems.He is currently leading
the development of the QUEST beamline, dedicated to unifying materials design and advanced spectroscopy at the Swiss Light Source 2.0.
Alex USOSKIN
Teresa PUIG
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