Our Team
First Light Fusion
Business Lead: Francisco Suzuki-Vidal
Francisco joined First Light from Imperial College, where he was a Royal Society Fellow working in High Energy Density Science, in particularly the use of lab scale experiments to study astrophysical dynamics. Francisco now heads academic collaborations at First Light on its own gas guns and pulsed power systems and at external facilities.
Project Manager: Claudia Gonzalez
Claudia manages all business aspects of the project team, from our meetings to invoicing. She was a key part of the team that applied for the Partnership in 2022, and manages a series of grants and awards at First Light. Prior to joining FLF, Claudia worked as a consultant for IQS, organising funding for new products and process improvements.
Hugo Doyle
Hugo Doyle is Head of Experimental Physics at First Light Fusion Ltd. His team has been responsible for building the capability to experimentally validate fusion in the laboratory, proving the First Light projectile fusion concept in 2022. This involved building a launcher to accelerate 1 cm scale projectiles to 10 km/s to impact deuterium tritium filled targets and measuring the burst of neutrons emitted. He has been at First Light for ten years. Before this he studied laser driven laboratory astrophysics during his PhD at Imperial and as a post-doc at Oxford which involved using some of the largest lasers in the world to reproduce conditions similar to those found at the centre of a star
Nick Hawker
CEO and CTO of First Light Fusion, Nick co-founded the company >10 years ago based on his own DPhil research at the University of Oxford. Nick is responsible for the research and development efforts across the company, managing multiple technical leads, whilst ensuring ongoing funding, and supervising external relationships and strategic partnerships.
Nathan Joiner
Head of Computational Science and Engineering at First Light, Nathan has worked at First Light since 2017 with his team to advance the development, verification and validation of two multiphysics hydrocodes, plasma microphysics models, systems models, data science tools, and machine learning tools. Before joining First Light, Nathan was an aerospace engineering consultant, specialising in high enthalpy flows. He has a PhD in microstability and turbulence in magnetised fusion plasmas.
Imperial College London
Academic Lead: Simon Bland
Professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College, Simon’s interests include High Energy Density Science, in particular Inertial Confinement Fusion, isentropic compression techniques and generating convergent shockwaves in materials. Simon enjoys developing and utilsing novel diagnostic techniques for dense plasmas including X-pinches and the use of synchrotron beamlines with pulse power drivers.
Jeremy Chittenden
A Professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College, Jerry’s work concentrates on numerical modelling of High Energy Density Physics relating to inertial confinement fusion and magnetised Z-pinch plasmas. To these ends Jerry created and leads development of the ‘Gorgon’ and ‘Chimera’ radiation magneto-hydrodynamics codes which are continually evolved to incorporate new techniques and physics packages.
Grigory Kagan
Dr. Kagan is currently a Lecturer in Theoretical Plasma Physics at Imperial College London. Prior to assuming this position he was a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Lab for about 10 years, where he obtained a number of pioneering results on kinetic effects in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and led the LDRD project ``Missing physics behind X-ray emission from high-energy-density plasmas''. His earlier research was concerned with tokamaks. Dr. Kagan revisited the conventional neoclassical theory to find important modifications to the ion transport and electron bootstrap current, which need to be introduced in the tokamak pedestal as opposed to the core region.
Sergey Lebedev
Professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College, Sergey leads High Energy Density Science research on the ‘in house’ MAGPIE pulsed power facility. Sergey pioneered the use of pulsed power to drive laboratory astrophysics experiments and explores topics ranging from high current power flow, to the use of X-ray radiation to drive material ablation, and creating scaled experiments to study magnetized shockwaves and reconnection.
Roland Smith
Professor in the Physics Department, Roland’s research interests cover areas of high power and ultra-short pulse laser development, experimental laser matter interaction physics (particularly with micro and nanoscale targets), laboratory based experimental astrophysics and high energy density science. To support this his team operates the ‘in house’ "Cerberus" laser, a multi-beam high-power laser system that can connect to MAGPIE.
Jergus Strucka
A postdoc in the Physics Department, Jergus’ interests revolve around performing exquisitely detailed measurements of High Energy Density Plasmas and shocked materials, enabling quantitative comparison to computer simulations. Jergus pioneered efforts to study hydrodynamic instabilities driven by exploding wires on synchrotron beamlines and is developing a radiation driven platform for studying heat transport in plasmas on MAGPIE.
Ellie Tubman
As a lecturer in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London Ellie is researching into magnetic fields generated under extreme conditions, particularly within inertial confinement fusion targets. She uses laser facilities such as the Orion laser (AWE, UK), the Omega laser (LLE, USA) and the NIF laser (LLNL, USA) to perform experiments to give insight into the plasma dynamics. The physics learnt from these investigations can also be applied to increase our understanding of astrophysical phenomena, such as shock waves and magnetic reconnection
Xi Deng
As a postdoctoral researcher within the Department of Chemical Engineering, Xi focuses his expertise on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and complex multi-component flow simulations. His work revolves around the development of high-accuracy numerical methods and high-fidelity physical models to simulate multi-scale and multi-physics processes in flow systems.
Omar Matar
Professor in Fluid Mechanics and Head of the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College, Omar’s research interests encompass the numerical modelling of fluid flows, especially those consisting of multiple phases. Omar’s modelling is across multiple scales from Molecular Dynamics to continuum and includes the effects of heat and mass transfer and the influence of EM fields.
University of Oxford
Daniel Eakins
A Professor in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, Dan’s research concentrates on impacts and shockwave generation from the microscopic to macroscopic scales. Dan’s team performed the first imaging of cavity collapse driven by a shockwave using the European Synchrotron Radiation source, and his interests include precursors, heterogeneous materials and dynamic failure and fragmentation.
Gianluca Gregori
A Professor in the Department of Physics at Oxford, Gianluca’s main research interests include inertial confinement fusion, in particular the equation of state of highly compressed matter; laboratory astrophysics, hydromagnetic turbulence and heat transport. Gianluca employs molecular dynamics simulations to study strongly correlated systems, including using machine learning for enhancing computational tools.
Lois Heslop
Lois is a PhD student in Engineering Science exploring the shockwave driven compression of different cavity shapes.
Robert Paddock
A postdoc in the department of Engineering Science, Robert’s work to-date has involved a range of simulations investigating novel approaches to inertial fusion energy, along with experiments to measure the equation of state of fusion-relevant foams. His current work is focussed on further exploring hydrodynamics in fusion-relevant regimes, including developing experimental capabilities to enable higher pressure experiments at synchrotron facilities.
Sam Vinko
Professor in Atomic and Laser Physics at the University of Oxford, Sam explores High Energy Density Plasmas using a wide range of experimental and theoretical techniques. Sam has led campaigns at multiple laser facilities at at LCLS.
University of York
Andy Higginbotham
Senior Lecturer in the Laser-Plasma Physics, Andy’s interests include dynamic compression of materials into HEDP states, use of in-situ X-ray probing to diagnose material properties during high-strain compression, and atomistic simulation of dynamic compression.
Chris Ridgers
Professor and Director of York Plasma Institute. Chris’ major research interests are theory and modelling based, and include advanced kinetic simulations of High Energy Density systems utilizing PIC codes. Chris is modelling the effects of thermal transport between materials with large difference in Z for the partnership.
Nigel Woolsey
Professor and Strand leader of Laser Plasmas and Extreme Conditions (LPEC) at the Department of Physics at York. Nigel’s major research interests are laser-plasma laboratory astrophysics; inertial confinement fusion via direct drive and in particular shock ignition; and the creation of novel far from equilibrium states of matter. Nigel also advises the partnership on how to encourage a more diverse community of researchers as we grow.
Machine Discovery
Bijan Kiani
CEO of Machine Discovery was previously a Vice President of Synopsys, a NASDAQ listed Electronic Design Automation company with a $3.7B turnover.
Christina Sweeney
VP People, Growth & Culture of Machine Discovery, Christina manages the finances, HR, ESG for Machine Discovery. Previously, Christina contributed to the growth of several start-ups, and managed finance projects at the University of Oxford.