Lucio Milanese

Lucio Milanese is co-founder and Chief External Affairs Officer at Proxima Fusion, one of Europe’s fastest-growing nuclear fusion start-ups, and is actively involved in a model that could reshape the global energy future.

Proxima Fusion, founded in 2023, is focused on developing the stellarator, considered the most promising path towards a commercially viable fusion power plant. Proxima has now raised around €200 million in total funding and aims to bring fusion to the grid by 2030.

In 2025, he joined the Board of the Fusion Industry Association.

Before co-founding Proxima, he served as a Senior Advisor at McKinsey & Company, where he worked with leading private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and companies on strategic analyses of nuclear fusion and due diligence activities.

Milanese studied physics at Imperial College London, before furthering his training through research placements at the California Institute of Technology and EPFL, prior to joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, where he became a member of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Plasma Science and Fusion Centre. At MIT, he obtained a PhD in theoretical plasma physics, during which he identified a new mechanism that helped lay the foundations for a general theory of turbulence in plasmas, with significant implications for understanding the solar wind and the solar corona.

Between 2021 and 2022, Milanese further enhanced his profile as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he obtained a Master’s degree in Global Affairs.