Zap Energy

Benj Conway studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and University College, Oxford before spending a decade in the British Foreign Service. After leaving government, he became an award-winning restaurateur and founded InFrontier, a private equity firm focused on frontier markets that launched the first fund for Afghanistan globally. Conway encountered the University of Washington fusion research of Uri Shumlak and Brian Nelson and co-founded Zap Energy in 2017 to commercialize their sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch approach. As President, he leads company strategy and financing, having raised over $200 million in venture capital for Zap's magnet-free fusion program.

Uri Shumlak is a professor in the University of Washington's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics who has studied Z-pinch fusion throughout his career. He earned his undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where researchers were actively investigating fusion confinement. At UW, Shumlak developed the sheared-flow stabilization technique that suppresses the instabilities that have historically made Z-pinch plasmas uncontrollable. He co-founded Zap Energy in 2017 to commercialize this approach, which eliminates the need for the superconducting magnets required by most other fusion architectures, dramatically reducing system cost and complexity.

Brian A. Nelson is an emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, where he collaborated with Uri Shumlak on sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch research for many years. Nelson's experimental plasma physics work and expertise in pulsed power systems contributed to demonstrating the sheared-flow stabilization phenomenon at laboratory scale, establishing the scientific basis for Zap Energy's fusion approach. He co-founded Zap Energy in 2017, bringing decades of hands-on experience designing and operating Z-pinch plasma experiments at the University of Washington to the company's engineering foundation.