Munich, Bavaria, Germany
I am a co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a European fusion energy company, spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in 2023. At Proxima, we are working towards fusion power plants based on quasi-isodynamic stellarators. We see Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the most advanced stellarator in the world, as showing the clearest and most robust path to fusion energy. I believe that Europe has tremendous advantages when it comes to stellarator R&D, and that successful innovation requires not only creativity but also courage to break with the status quo. I completed my PhD in plasma physics and fusion energy at MIT in 2021. My PhD research focused on the Alcator C-Mod and DIII-D tokamaks in the USA, particularly on the application of reduced models, optimization and Bayesian inference for fusion. After my PhD, I joined the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, working on divertor spectroscopy and numerical optimization on the ASDEX-Upgrade tokamak and the W7-X stellarator. During some of this time, I was one of the European Scientific Coordinators for experimental research on negative triangularity tokamak scenarios. I previously worked on research projects at the MAGPIE Z-pinch facility at Imperial College London (UK), at the TCV tokamak at EPFL (Switzerland), at the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (USA), and at the APEX-D facility at the MPI-IPP (Germany).
Developing fusion power plants based on the quasi-isodynamic stellarator concept.
Research on edge spectroscopy, particle transport, and reduced divertor modeling.
EuroFusion Scientific Coordinator for the RT07 task force on negative triangularity tokamak scenarios, focusing on experiments at TCV and ASDEX Upgrade.
Science entrepreneurship courses (BSF7 and NEXT2): www.wilbe.com/bsf
Graduate School in Physics, within the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at MIT.