Experience · the whole team
Sixty years of fusion, on one team.
The Kronos design rests on a rare depth of experience. Follow the decades — the machines our founders and advisors built, from the first high-field tokamaks to ITER, NIF, and the leading stellarators.
150+
Combined years in fusion
40+
Senior scientists, engineers & leaders
6
Decades of programs
Alcator→ITER→NIF
Programs the team has built
1960s – 1970s
The first high-field tokamaks
Dr. Carl Weggel
MIT Francis Bitter Magnet Lab — designed the Alcator tokamaks (Alcator A, Guinness-record field)
Dr. Robert J. Weggel
Co-designed Alcator C magnets; began a career of record-setting magnets
Dr. Steven O. Dean
Directed DOE/AEC Confinement Systems — the US fusion program takes shape
1980s
Mirrors, D–³He & compact fusion
Dr. Gerald Kulcinski
UW–Madison — D–³He tandem mirror with direct conversion (1987); first steady-state He-3 fusion across successive IEC experiments. ↗
Dr. Carl Weggel
Led ultra-high-field magnets for the RIGGATRON compact-fusion program (INESCO)
Dr. Robert J. Weggel
Brookhaven — 20 T hybrid magnets & cryogenic superconducting systems
Dr. David A. Hammer
Cornell — founded the X-pinch pulsed-power program
1990s – 2000s
ITER, NIF & the codes that run fusion
Dr. Ruben Fair
Head of US ITER projects (PPPL); world-first HTS machines
Dr. Siegfried Glenzer
Led the first inertial-confinement fusion experiments at NIF
Dr. Donald A. Spong
ORNL — STELLOPT; NCSX / QPS stellarator design
Dr. Wilfred A. Cooper
EPFL — VMEC / TERPSICHORE; Wendelstein 7-X optimization
Dr. Patrick H. Diamond
Plasma turbulence & transport — Hannes Alfvén Prize
Dr. Philippe Lebrun
CERN — led the LHC cryogenics, the largest ever built
Dr. Jack J. Dongarra
LINPACK / TOP500 — the HPC backbone of fusion simulation (Turing Award)
Dr. Gerald Kulcinski
2005 D–³He development paper — prior art the Kronos burner extends
2010s
SPARC / CFS, SMRs & the materials frontier
Patrick Schweiger
Chief Engineer, Commonwealth Fusion Systems; Gen-IV at TerraPower
Dr. Robert J. Weggel
Consulted for CFS on large-scale HTS field coils
Dr. Nasr Ghoniem
Directed the UCLA Fusion Science Center — materials under radiation
Dr. Gary Was · Dr. Ahmed Hassanein
Radiation materials & plasma–material interactions (Michigan · Argonne)
Martin Owens
Directed the BWRX-300 SMR program (GE-Hitachi); LANL capital projects
Dr. Ray Sedwick
Direct energy conversion & bremsstrahlung recovery (Maryland / MIT)
2020s
Kronos — the two-machine architecture
Priyanca Ford & the founding team
Converge six decades of experience into a breeder-first design: HYPERION + the D–³He burner
The full advisory bench
Physics, magnets, materials, computation, safety & delivery — see the bench
One team has already built much of modern fusion. Kronos is what they build next.
Programs are placed by era; roles and tenures vary — see the leadership page for current roles and dates, and Heritage for the founders' machine-by-machine lineage.