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.
