Sir David Harding joins Tokamak Energy Board

Sir David Harding joins Tokamak Energy Board

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Tokamak Energy has announced that Sir David Harding has joined its Board of Directors.

Sir David, who has been at the forefront of systematic investment management for more than 30 years, saw the potential of the spherical tokamak path to fusion energy in 2014 when he first invested in the company, and brings world leading finance and commercial expertise to the board.

Dr. Chris Martin, Chairman of Tokamak Energy, said: “Sir David joins the board at an exciting time for the company and fusion energy and we look forward to his contribution as we advance fusion’s potential to significantly decarbonise the global economy.”

Sir David’s appointment comes at the same time as the announcement of a world-first with the ST40 spherical tokamak achieving a plasma temperature of 100M degrees Celsius, the threshold required for commercial fusion energy. This is by far the highest temperature ever achieved in a spherical tokamak and by any privately funded tokamak. The ST40 will now be upgraded and used to develop technologies for future devices.

The ST-HTS will be the world’s first spherical tokamak to use high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets and is due to be commissioned in the mid-2020s. This device will demonstrate multiple advanced technologies required for fusion energy and inform the design of a world first fusion pilot plant, to be commissioned in the early 2030s.

Sir David Harding said: “The 100 million degree plasma temperature milestone brings Tokamak Energy significantly closer to making commercial fusion energy a reality. I am delighted to join the board as it enters an exciting new chapter to deliver a fusion demonstrator based on its world class technologies.”

Tokamak Energy has raised £120 million to-date from leading UK and European investors, including institutional investor Legal & General, Sir David Harding, Lord Simon Wolfson, and Dr Hans-Peter Wild.

Group CEO of Legal & General, Nigel Wilson, said: “After thirty years of limited progress in the sector, Tokamak Energy is now making great strides towards the delivery of fusion energy. Tokamak’s latest milestone reaching the temperature required for commercialisation is further evidence of progress being made. Energy needs to be clean, green and cheap, plus we need energy security. Legal & General invested into Tokamak Energy in 2016 to help accelerate and support this ambition. We are privileged to have Sir David Harding joining the board of directors to continue to drive forward the growth of the business, helping to ensure the UK can lead the way in this area.”

Read more about Sir David Harding and the rest of our Executive team here.

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Tokamak Energy moves closer to commercial fusion: 100M degree plasma a world record for a spherical tokamak
Chris Martin

Dr Chris Martin

Chairman

Chris Martin is the Tokamak Energy Chairman and a non-executive director. He has considerable international experience successfully growing businesses in the healthcare, energy and environmental sectors. He co-founded ADC Therapeutics in 2011, after launching Zynlonta for blood cancer and leading a NYSE IPO, he stepped down as CEO in May 2022.

He was also Co-Founder of Spirogen Ltd and its Chief Executive Officer leading up to the company’s sale to AstraZeneca in October 2013. Chris has a DPhil from Oxford and an MBA from IMD, and is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and a Sainsbury Management Fellow.

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Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. Warrick leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years and most recently managed £3.6B of annual spend as Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division. He has extensive experience in managing supply chains and leading operational and customer business divisions.

He is passionate about sustainability and clean energy, people, diversity and inclusion.

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David Kingham

Dr David Kingham

Executive Vice Chairman

David is our Executive Vice Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer. He is an integral part of our management team.

A trained theoretical physicist, he was one of the founders of the business and became our CEO in 2009 having spent almost two decades as the Managing Director of Oxford Innovation, a company that has supported hundreds of successful new technology ventures.

David successfully led Tokamak Energy through three investment rounds and worked with colleagues and investors to mastermind an ambitious, yet achievable, business plan to drive innovation and accelerate the development of our fusion energy mission.

David’s ample experience has proved invaluable in growing and directing the business. He is a former Chairman of the R&D Society and has been a director at various high technology and knowledge-based start-ups. He has also won and delivered major contracts aimed at supporting innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth at regional and international levels.

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Mikhail Gryaznevich

Dr Mikhail Gryaznevich

Chief Scientist

Mikhail is a founder of Tokamak Energy and our Chief Scientist. He is a leading global authority on tokamaks and has performed experiments on 16 different tokamak during his distinguished career.

After graduating with an Honours Diploma in Plasma Physics from the Leningrad University in his homeland, Mikhail earned a PhD in Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion from the USSR Academy of Science. In 1990, he joined the Culham Laboratory in Abingdon and has been responsible for leading experimental programmes, preparing and performing experiments, designing, constructing and operating tokamak systems and diagnostics, as well as supervising students and scientific and engineering personnel.

Mikhail is a Visiting Professor at Imperial College in London and an editorial board member for the Plasma Science & Technology Journal and the Open Plasma Physics Journal. He regularly lectures about the physics behind spherical tokamaks at universities and plasma physics schools across the world.

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Erik Bonino

Non-Executive Director

Erik Bonino joined Tokamak Energy as a Non-Executive Director in January 2021.

Erik has over 30 years’ international experience in the energy sector in operations, major projects and technology development.

Erik is a mentor to Imperial College London’s IVMS program where he advises a number of technology start-up companies in energy and related fields.

Erik retired from Shell in August 2018, where he held the roles of UK Country Chair and Executive Vice President of Downstream Technologies. His portfolio included Shell’s Catalyst and Licensing business through which he developed Shell’s bio-fuel technology. He also established Shell’s Global technology campus in Bengaluru, India. Prior to this he served as the Executive Vice President of Project and Engineering Services with responsibility for the delivery of new production facilities, technology and technical support for both the Upstream and Downstream Businesses.

Prior to joining Shell in 2002 Erik spent 18 years in the oil and gas industry, first in the leadership of major capital projects and then in management consulting as Vice President of Energy and Utilities with Cap Gemini Ernst and Young. As a senior consultant he has advised many blue-chip energy companies on operational performance improvement and has led utility privatisations in Europe.

Erik holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from Southampton University. He is a Fellow of the Energy Institute.

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David Gray CBE

Non-Executive Director

David Gray joined Tokamak Energy as a Non-Executive Director in October 2019.

He has spent 30 years working in financial markets, mainly with HSBC, and has extensive experience of the energy sector including advisory roles on the initial privatisations of British Gas and the electricity sector.

He is currently Chair of Mutual Energy and the Energy Innovation Centre (EIC). Mutual Energy is an energy infrastructure company based in Northern Ireland. It owns the electricity and gas interconnectors between Scotland and Northern Ireland together with gas transmission assets in both countries. The EIC acts as an intermediary between innovators and energy network companies to optimise the effective adoption of innovative solutions by the industry.

David was previously Chair of the Gas & Electricity Markets Authority (the board of the energy regulator, Ofgem) from 2013 – 2018 and was Ofgem’s Managing Director, Networks from 2003 – 2007. After leaving Ofgem in 2008 he was a member of a panel advising the Department for Transport on the economic regulation of airports and subsequently led a review of Ofwat on behalf of DEFRA and the Welsh Assembly Government. He was also a non-executive Director of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) from 2009 to 2019.

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David Harding

Sir David Harding

Non-Executive Director

Sir David Harding joined Tokamak Energy as a non-executive Director in March 2022. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Winton Group Limited.

Sir David graduated from Cambridge University with a First Class Honours degree in Natural Sciences specialising in Theoretical Physics. He then embarked on a career in the analysis of futures and trading markets, which led him to co-found Adam, Harding and Lueck Ltd in 1987 with Martin Lueck and Michael Adam. AHL rapidly became one of the leading commodity trading advisors in the UK and was acquired by Man Group plc in 1994. Sir David left Man Group plc in 1996 and in February 1997, he co-founded Winton with Martin Hunt and Osman Murgian with a commitment to applying financial mathematics and empirical scientific research to creating and developing trading systems for the financial markets.

Sir David has endowed a number of significant projects principally supporting the funding of basic science research in the UK and around the world, including the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and the Winton Bio-informatics Suite at the Francis Crick Institute. In 2019, Sir David’s foundation gave US$130 million to Cambridge University.

He sits on the Advisory Board of the Royal Society and the University of Cambridge Development Board, and is an honorary Fellow of the Science Museum, and of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

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Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. Warrick leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years and most recently managed £3.6B of annual spend as Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division. He has extensive experience in managing supply chains and leading operational and customer business divisions.

He is passionate about sustainability and clean energy, people, diversity and inclusion.

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Thomas Pfisterer

Non-Executive Director

Thomas is Director of Direct Investments of the WILD Family Investment Office.  He joined the Family Office following the sale of WILD Flavors GmbH, one of the world’s leading suppliers of natural ingredients to the food and beverage industry, for which he served as Head of Strategic Development directing the company’s global M&A activities since October 2011.  Thomas currently serves on the Boards of Directors of several other companies, including TTTech Computertechnik AG.  He holds a Master’s in Finance from Cambridge University, UK, as well as a BA in Economics and a BA in Business Administration, both from University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

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Daniel Freeman

Non-Executive Director

Daniel Freeman leads Dorilton Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in advanced technology companies. He has more than 20 years’ experience investing across a range of geographies and asset classes at firms including Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, and Eton Park Capital Management. Daniel holds an AB in East Asian Studies from Princeton, was a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Centre for Chinese and American Studies, and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

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Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. Warrick leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years and most recently managed £3.6B of annual spend as Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division. He has extensive experience in managing supply chains and leading operational and customer business divisions.

He is passionate about sustainability and clean energy, people, diversity and inclusion.

Close

Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. Warrick leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years and most recently managed £3.6B of annual spend as Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division. He has extensive experience in managing supply chains and leading operational and customer business divisions.

He is passionate about sustainability and clean energy, people, diversity and inclusion.

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Warren East

Warren East

Non-Executive Director

Warren East CBE, previously CEO of Rolls-Royce and Arm, joined Tokamak Energy as Non-Executive Director in May 2023.

After 11 years at Texas Instruments, Warren joined Arm in 1994, was appointed to the board in 2000, and was CEO from 2001 to 2013. Under his leadership, Arm became the world’s leading semiconductor IP licensing company.

In 2014, Warren became a non-executive director of Rolls-Royce Holdings and chair of the board’s technology committee. As CEO from April 2015, he led Rolls-Royce through the Covid-19 pandemic impact on global aviation and championed the strategic shift to net zero. After seven years leading Rolls-Royce, he retired from the company on 31 December 2022.

Warren is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering, a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and a companion of the Chartered Management Institute. Warren has a degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University, an MBA from Cranfield, and honorary doctorates from Cranfield and Newcastle Universities. With his wife, he established The Relithan Charitable Trust, supporting science education. He was made CBE in 2014 for services to Engineering and Technology.

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Rory Scott Russell

Non-Executive Director

Rory is head of Venture Capital at East Innovate, the venture capital arm of East X, the quantitative commodity technology and research company. East Innovate invests and partners with early-stage research-driven start-ups addressing the global energy challenge. He is the founder and co-founder of several technology companies, following an early career in international energy. He has a BSc in Computer Science and Al from the University of Edinburgh.

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