Gabriel Plunk is a research scientist in the Stellarator Theory department (ST) of IPP, Greifswald. His scientific interests include gyrokinetic stability, turbulence, transport, and the theoretical foundations of stellarator optimization.
Francesco is a co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a startup headquartered in Munich working on QI stellarators. Following his undergraduate studies at Imperial College and EPFL, Francesco did his PhD at MIT, working on spectroscopy and particle transport in tokamaks. He then joined IPP to do research on divertor spectroscopy and reduced edge modeling at ASDEX Upgrade. In 2022, he was one the EuroFusion Scientific Coordinators for negative triangularity, considered a potential path to tokamak power plants. In January 2023, Francesco and his co-founders co-founded Proxima Fusion to pursue a new path with public-private partnerships to develop QI stellarators in Europe.
Idelfonso Tafur Monroy obtained his MSc from Saint Petersburg University of Telecommunications (Russia) in 1992 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in 1999. He also took courses at Stockholm University (Sweden), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Utrecht University. Tafur Monroy worked as Assistant Professor in Electro-Optical Communications at TU/e from 1999 to 2006, after which he became Associate Professor and later Full Professor at DTU Fotonik (Denmark). In the meantime, Tafur Monroy also worked at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications (China), UC Berkeley (USA) and ITMO University (Russia) as visiting professor.
Tafur Monroy founded Bifrost Communications in 2015. In 2017, he returned to TU/e to become Full Professor in the Electrooptical Communication (ECO) group of the electrical engineering department and to join the Institute for Photonic Integration. He is currently the leader of the team Quantum and Terahertz Systems (QTS) within the ECO group.
