Ahmed is the Head of Global Partnerships at Proxima Fusion, Europe’s leading stellarator company and the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. Based in Munich, he leads the company’s partnerships strategy across governments, industrial and supply-chain partners, national laboratories, and research organizations. He spent more than sixteen years at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), where he was a Distinguished Research Fellow and Principal Research Physicist and led the Enabling Technologies for Energy and Science and the Advanced Diagnostics Development divisions. He has pursued the development of advanced lasers, X-rays, and other diagnostics supporting microelectronics and quantum computing, high-energy-density plasmas, and magnetic fusion plasma research. Previously, he served as a Program Director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), and as Senior Fusion Advisor to the ARPA-E Director, where he stood up the agency’s $135M fusion portfolio and helped shape the U.S. national fusion strategy. Earlier, he was the inaugural Deputy Director for the public-private Innovation Network for Fusion Energy partnership, building some of the first bridges between national labs and private industry.
Ahmed is from Burkina Faso in West Africa. He earned his Diplôme d’Études Universitaires Générales from the University of Ouagadougou and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Iowa, followed by postdoctoral research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a research fellowship at the Australian National University. He has more than 150 peer-reviewed publications out in the world and frequently gives talks as an expert in fusion energy and plasma physics.
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