Beyond Ignition: The Engineering Challenge That Will Decide Fusion's Future | Dr. Will Regan, Ph.D. - Founder and Chief Scientist, Pacific Fusion

For decades, fusion researchers were chasing a single goal: ignition. But what if ignition isn't the finish line? What if it's only the starting gun? Today we're joined by Dr. Will Regan, Founder and Chief Scientist of Pacific Fusion, a company betting that the future of fusion won't be won by building bigger machines - but by solving one of engineering's toughest manufacturing challenges.

Dr. Will Regan, Ph.D. is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Pacific Fusion ( https://www.pacificfusion.com/ ), where he is helping lead one of the most ambitious efforts in advanced inertial fusion energy: developing a practical, scalable pathway to commercial fusion power using pulsed power systems and high-yield target physics.

Before founding Pacific Fusion, Will served as a Project Lead and Rapid Evaluator at X, the moonshot factory, where he helped originate and develop breakthrough concepts in agricultural and systems innovation, including early foundational work behind the Mineral initiative focused on sustainable food production at planetary scale.

Earlier in his career, he was an ARPA-E Fellow at Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, where he worked at the intersection of high-risk, high-reward energy technologies and national-scale innovation programs—an experience that helped shape his approach to large-scale energy system design and technology acceleration.

Will earned his PhD in Physics from University of California, Berkeley, following his undergraduate degree in Physics from Cornell University. Across academia, government, and moonshot industry environments, he has consistently focused on translating frontier physics into real-world systems—now centered on one of the most consequential engineering challenges of the century: fusion energy.

At Pacific Fusion, he is working to turn high-gain fusion concepts into repeatable, engineered systems that could fundamentally reshape global energy infrastructure.

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