Pacific Fusion

Eric Lander is a geneticist and mathematician best known as a founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and as the principal leader of the Human Genome Project. He later served as President Biden's Science Advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2021 to 2022. Lander co-founded Pacific Fusion in 2023 to commercialize pulsed magnetic fusion energy, bringing his experience building large scientific institutions and navigating federal research programs to the CEO role. Pacific Fusion raised over $900 million in its Series A round in 2024.

Keith LeChien holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and pulsed power science. He served as Director of Inertial Confinement Fusion at the National Nuclear Security Administration and led pulsed magnetic fusion programs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LeChien is one of the inventors of the Impedance-Matched Marx Generator (IMG), the pulsed power architecture central to Pacific Fusion's reactor design. As CTO, he directs the technical development of Pacific Fusion's pulsed magnetic approach to fusion, drawing on more than two decades of classified and unclassified pulsed power research at national laboratories.

Carrie Von Muench brings business and operations expertise to Pacific Fusion as COO, balancing a founding team of physicists with commercial and organizational leadership. Before co-founding Pacific Fusion in 2023, she worked at Alphabet's X (the moonshot factory), consulting in industrials and public sector at Boston Consulting Group, and in early-pipeline strategy at Google. Von Muench's experience navigating large-organization strategy and deep-tech commercialization is central to Pacific Fusion's effort to translate national-laboratory pulsed fusion physics into a viable commercial power technology.