Francesco Sciortino is Co-Founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion. As a fusion researcher and entrepreneur, he works to deliver fusion energy as a viable energy source. Originally from Italy, he did his undergraduate studies in Physics at Imperial College London. He entered the world of plasma physics working on a Z-pinch machine, and did his masters thesis at the TCV tokamak at EPFL in Switzerland. He then briefly worked on magnetic reconnection at Princeton, before moving to MIT for his PhD. His thesis, focused on experimental analysis of particle transport in tokamaks, was awarded the Piovesan Award. In 2021, he joined the Max Planck Society in Germany to work on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. While acting as one of the European scientific coordinators for tokamak research, he became progressively more interested in stellarators, and was particularly inspired by the W7-X experiment. In January 2023, Francesco co-founded Proxima Fusion, a Munich-based startup that aims to bring stellarators and their promise of clean, safe and abundant energy to market. As the first-ever spin-out company from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Proxima Fusion is designing the first generation of fusion power plants using quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators—the clearest, most robust path to commercial fusion.