Behind First Light Fusion is a team of nearly 100 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 a leadership team with unparalleled knowledge, insight and deep sector expertise. Our executive team has experience in many fields, including energy, business, military, finance, and deep tech.
Executive Management
Nicholas Hawker
Co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer
Nick’s research into fusion began in 2007 as part of his masters thesis, where he worked at the University of Oxford with Yiannis Ventikos. This work continued into a DPhil, where he performed hydrodynamic simulations of shock-driven cavity collapse. These simulations showed that cavity collapse leads to inertial confinement of the gas inside the cavity and revealed that extreme states of matter could be reached, possibly entering the regime for fusion. To explore the concept of energy generation via this process, Nick and Yiannis co-founded First Light Fusion Ltd in 2011.
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.
Senior Management
Dr Hugo Doyle
Head of Empirical Validation
Hugo joined First Light in 2014 and runs the department whose mission is to validate our advanced target designs. His team has been responsible for building the capability to experimentally validate fusion in the laboratory, proving the First Light projectile fusion concept last year. This involved developing launchers to accelerate 1 cm scale projectiles to ~10 km/s to impact deuterium tritium filled targets and measuring the burst of neutrons emitted, in the laboratory in Oxfordshire.
Before First Light, Hugo finished his PhD at Imperial College in laboratory astrophysics. After a secondment to AWE plc., he moved to Oxford University for two years as a Research Associate. This work involved using some of the largest lasers in the world to reproduce conditions similar to those found at the centre of a star and developing diagnostics to measure them. This provided experience running multi-national, multi-disciplinary research experiments at facilities around the world on a strict budget and time frame.
He has technical expertise with high energy density plasma physics, a wide range of diagnostic techniques and driver platforms as well as the various resource and risk management methods needed for large scale experiments.
Dr Paul Holligan
VP Commercial and Strategic Partnerships
Paul joined First Light Fusion in 2016 to lead the pulsed power developments and the design and construction of three pulsed power drivers. The team also completed the conceptual design of Machine 4, a gain demonstrator, developing a unique engineering capability for the design and optimisation of fusion systems. Paul now leads the fusion driver and strategic partnership work, which encompasses a range of different driver options and builds the partnerships required to deliver on our strategy.
Previously, Paul spent 21 years working at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Central Laser Facility, with his final five years as Head of Electrical Engineering, Pulsed Power, and Control. He was responsible for the operation and maintenance of the existing high-power laser facilities and the development of new technologies and laser systems. This technology development and operation align perfectly with the mission of First Light and the future direction of the company.
Dr Nathan Joiner
Head of Computational Physics
Nathan joined First Light Fusion in 2017, to provide strategic leadership to the development of First Lights computational modelling capabilities. Nathan provides oversight and guidance to the activities of twenty computational & theoretical physicists, data scientists, and software engineers.
Prior to joining First Light, he had seventeen years technical experience covering a wide range of computational science and engineering applications. During his PhD in Plasma Physics from Imperial College London, he specialised in theoretical and numerical studies of Tokamak plasma instabilities and turbulence. This research direction was also pursued for several years as a postdoctoral fellow.
Nathan then spent seven years as an aerospace engineering consultant, specialising in the modelling and simulation of hypersonic gas dynamics and thermal protection systems. He has contributed to the design of aerothermal systems used in planetary probes, reusable spacecraft, and rocket motors. Nathan was a customer interface in projects for ESA, Airbus, Lockheed-Martin UK, Thales, and AWE.
Ian Cooke
Head of Operational Delivery
Ian joined First Light Fusion in 2021, to manage the delivery of scientific programmes and help to optimise our pace of development. Ian interfaces with the technical and operational functions to create an overarching plan, whilst managing dependencies and risk to support the delivery of First Light’s primary objectives.
Prior to joining First Light, Ian gained 14 years of experience delivering and later leading research and development projects, predominantly in the motorsport and automotive industry. Ten of those years were spent with the Mercedes AMG Formula One team, focused on the development of the hybrid powertrain and transmission systems. There Ian gained experience delivering and utilising a wide range of experimental capability, from component-level tests, to running real-time, hardware-in-the-loop race simulations with entire vehicles for the works team and customers such as McLaren Racing and Williams Racing.
To complement this, Ian spent four years working in commercial engineering consultancies, focused on the test and development of high-performance and electric vehicle powertrains for manufacturers such as McLaren Cars, Lamborghini and Aston Martin.
Dr Rafel Bordas
Head of Data Driven Engineering
Rafel joined First Light Fusion Ltd in February 2021 to establish the Data Science function. He now heads the Data Driven Engineering department. The team develop accurate models combining numerical simulation with experimental data using machine learning methods to support FLF’s target and amplifier design process.
Rafel has a background is in applied mathematics and 20 years of experience working with computational models and translating their results into real world insight. Rafel holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computing from the University of Warwick, an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and D.Phil. (PhD) in Computer Science from the University of Oxford. During his D.Phil. he developed simulation tools to investigate cardiac electrophysiology function. He subsequently spent four and a half years as a post-doctoral researcher investigating clinical lung airways applications through a combined data analysis, imaging and simulation approach.
Rafel transitioned from academia to industry in early 2016 when he joined Emerson Automation Solutions, a Fortune 500 company. At Emerson he became the lead developer on the statistical core of an industrial strength data assimilation and uncertainty analysis software package specialised for use in sub-surface applications.