Behind First Light Fusion is a team of extremely talented scientists, engineers, technicians and business experts. Our team come from a range of backgrounds but are all united by a passion for realising fusion energy at scale.
First Light Fusion is headed up by an Executive Management Team with unparalleled knowledge, insight and deep sector expertise and experience in a diverse range of fields, including energy, business, military, finance, and deep tech.
Executive Management
Mark Thomas
Chief Executive Officer
David Bryon
Chief Financial Officer
With more than two decades of diverse industry experience and over 15 years supporting UK university spinouts in senior roles, David brings to First Light deep hands-on experience and an alternative perspective from his extensive career. Tech start-ups are a natural fit for his skills; his business insight and focus on pragmatic outcomes allow his teams to make hard things possible.
After several roles and a merger, he moved on by setting up Right Brain Finance, a consultancy offering financial direction and business support to a wide range of entrepreneurial tech businesses across South-East England. Despite considerable success (with VC backed clients in sectors that ranged from Sports Health Tech to Industrial Biotech), David found it frustrating to only “advise” but not be able to “do”. He therefore took the opportunity in 2015 to join the board and then to take the executive role of CFO at First Light Fusion, one of the businesses he had supported as a consultant.
David has been a CIMA MIP, and holds a BA in Geography and a MSc in Psychology.
Ryan Ramsey
Chief Operations Officer
A seasoned leader in the business world and military, Ryan translates leadership experience and knowledge from corporate sectors such as energy, electricity transmission, renewables and nuclear translating strategy into tactical employment.
Among a variety of leadership roles, he has led as Head of Electricity Construction (VP) for National Grid, leading a team of 250 National Grid employees and 4000 contractors delivering 148 major infrastructure projects around the UK.
His bedrock has been a career in the Royal Navy Submarine Service. His leadership and teamwork have been tested during an operationally focused career operating as far afield as under the Arctic Ice Cap to the Indian Ocean. He has also worked for the Royal Netherlands Navy, US Navy and Counter Terrorism forces.
His notable military assignments were Captain of the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Turbulent and Commander of the world-renowned Submarine Command Course ‘Perisher’. He was responsible for teaching submarine captains to deal with the challenges of leadership, risk-taking and decision-making in the 21st Century.
He has two Masters degrees and is part of the Windsor Leadership Programme Alumni. He is a published author.
Laura Hillier
General Counsel
Laura is an experienced and agile General Counsel with over 20 years of diverse commercial and legal experience in both public and private companies. Laura established her legal career in the City at Slaughter and May and then moved in-house in 2011, when she helped to establish ViiV Healthcare (a GlaxoSmithKline / Pfizer /Shionogi joint venture company). Laura supported the business from its inception through scale-up to the global launch of its multi-billion pound blockbuster drug, dolutegravir.
Laura has supported a portfolio of start-up and scale up companies both in legal and operational roles, including as COO of an AIM-listed health data company. Laura has a BA in Jurisprudence from Oxford University and a Masters in Competition Law from Kings College, London.
Our Board
Bart Markus
Chairman
Apart from being a veteran VC, Bart is a seasoned and passionate entrepreneur and is renowned for his relentless drive to internationalise companies and help them become successful beyond Europe by conquering the US or Asia. A Dutch native, he has been a General Partner at Wellington from 2000 to 2015 and played a significant role in building Wellington from a €50M fund in 1999 to a well established player in the European VC market with some €800M of assets under management.
Bart spent the past 18 years as an investor in High Tech companies, and additionally as a serial entrepreneur himself co-founded by now 6 companies including Hexagem, a defect-free GaN substrate technology company and the MRI Centre, a highly successful chain of private medical diagnostic clinics. He also set up and acted as CEO for ePearle, a pan-European B2B eCommerce start-up.
Bart started his career as a process control system and project engineer with Shell in Norway and then worked at McKinsey, both in the Netherlands and South Africa.
Bart holds an MSc in Applied Physics from Twente University of Technology in the Netherlands and an MBA (with distinction) from INSEAD in France.
Stephen Brindle
Non-Executive Director
Between 2008 and 2016, Stephen was Managing Partner of Technikos LLP, an early stage venture capital fund with a long term commercial contract with Oxford University’s Bio-medical Engineering Department.
Stephen previously worked for 10 years in the City, as an equity salesman, where he focused on the life sciences sector.
Before that he spent 6 years as a management consultant, latterly with Deloitte Consulting. He has a BSc Econ from the LSE.
Yiannis Ventikos
Co-founder & Non-Executive Director
Yiannis Ventikos is the Kennedy Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. He has worked or studied in Greece, France, the USA and Switzerland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Andreas Lusch
Non-Executive Director
Andreas Lusch is an experienced global leader with deep domain expertise in the oil & gas and energy industry. He is the former President & CEO of GE Steam Power, a 4.5 billion USD global business covering the industry’s widest range of technologies for nuclear and coal applications as well as environmental control systems, from product development to turnkey power plant solutions.
From 2000 to 2005 Andreas was in the executive board of Lurgi AG, a technology and EPC company active in the field of oil & gas, petrochemicals and life sciences. He holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.
Robert Trezona
Non-Executive Director
Robert is the Head of Cleantech at IP Group plc, a £1bn venture capital firm that backs scientific breakthroughs with permanent capital from the public markets. Over the last decade IP Group has been the most active venture investor in climate technology startups in the UK, with over 40 investments to date and notable successes including Ceres Power, First Light Fusion and Oxbotica. Outside cleantech, Robert also led IP Group’s investment in Hinge Health, a $6bn pioneer in digital treatment for back and joint pain.
In addition to his work at IP Group, Robert serves as a Commissioner for the Energy Transitions Commission, a diverse, global group of leaders from industry, finance and public life who are working to accelerate the transition to zero-carbon energy, industry and transport. Robert was also a member of the UK Government Green Finance Taskforce and advises the UK government and other stakeholders on the development of a thriving green finance industry in the UK.
Our Science Advisory Board
Jeremy Chittenden
Scientific Advisor
Jeremy Chittenden is a Professor of Plasma Physics at Imperial College with over 30 years’ experience of innovative research in fields of high energy density physics, laboratory astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). He is responsible for developing a broad range of radiation hydrodynamics, MHD and kinetic plasma modelling tools which are used extensively in the design of experiments through collaborations with groups in the UK, US & France.
Prof. Chittenden is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a divisional associate editor of Physical Review Letters and has published over 170 peer reviewed articles. He joins the board, on an independent basis, via Imperial Consultants.
Andrew Randewich
Scientific Advisor
After completing a PhD in plasma physics, Andrew joined AWE in 1997 in the High Altitude Nuclear Effects Team where he developed a novel capability to model Nuclear Induced Van Allen Belts, worked on Electromagnetic Pulse phenomenology, and won the AWE Discovery Award for Early Career Scientific Innovation. Andrew later worked on thermonuclear burn modelling in support of Inertial Confinement Fusion and as a Team Leader in the Computational Physics Group. Since then, Andrew managed the Physics Certification programme and later led the High Performance Computing Group.
From 2016 Andrew was Head of Physics Function comprising 550 staff including AWE’s Criticality and Design Safety groups. Andrew became Director of Science, Engineering and Technology in 2019 and also picked up the AWE Chief Scientist role again looking after 1800 staff and the major facilities supporting the science and engineering behind the Certification of the UK Deterrent. Since 2020 Andrew has been Executive Director Engineering and Science and manages 3100 people; around half of the AWE workforce.
Andrew regularly sits on national and international review panels, for example he has served on the UK Fusion Advisory Board, the US National Ignition Facility Management Advisory Committee, several NNSA reviews of Inertial Confinement Fusion, the Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory Board and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority Research Board. Andrew sits on the AWE Diversity and Inclusion Strategy Board and IOP Women in Physics Advisory Panel, and previously the Institute of Physics Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Andrew has twice been a judge for the national Women in Science and Engineering awards. For six years Andrew was deputy Chair of the AWE Nuclear Safety Committee, the Warhead Safety Committee and a co-opted member of the MoD Trident Safety Committee, and was appointed as a visiting Professor at Imperial College, London in 2012. He is a Chartered Physicist, a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.
Photo UK Ministry of Defence © Crown Copyright (2022)
Steven Rose
Scientific Advisor
Steven Rose has worked in plasma physics for all of his career, with a particular emphasis on plasmas produced using high-power lasers.
He has spent much of that time at the two high-power laser facilities in the UK: the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s Central Laser Facility where he became the Associate Director for Physics, and at AWE Aldermaston where he was the Head of Plasma Physics.
Professor Rose joined Imperial College as the Head of Plasma Physics in December 2006 and in 2011 was appointed the Vice-Dean for Natural Sciences at Imperial, a position he held until 2014. In 2015 he was appointed Professorial Research Fellow at Oxford.
Dr. Rick Spielman
Scientific Advisor
Rick Spielman received his Ph.D. in Plasma Physics from the University of California, Davis, in 1978, where he was a Chancellor’s Fellow and a Regent’s Fellow. Moving to Sandia National Laboratories in 1979, he was first a Member of the Technical Staff, then a Principal Member of the Technical Staff, and finally a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. He was the Chief Scientist and Project Manager at Sandia for the successful Z Machine – the most powerful pulsed-power driver in the world.
Dr. Spielman is leading the design effort for a potential intermediate pulsed-power facility and is working with Sandia National Laboratories in the design of the Next Generation Pulsed Power (NGPP) facility. He is heading the LLE program for short-pulse laser effects for external customers.