Fasoli graduated from
the University of Milan, (in physics, 1988) and from
EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (PhD in Science, 1993, EPFL best thesis award). He went on to do his post-doctoral research on
JET, the world's largest fusion reactor, participating in 1997 in the experiments that still hold the record for fusion power generated for peaceful purposes by a plasma on earth. He joined the Physics Department of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as tenure track assistant professor in 1997. At MIT, he led the plasma physics research group and coordinated the international scientific collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001, he joined the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences, then became associate professor, before being appointed full professor in physics in 2008. In 2007, he was appointed executive director of the Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas (CRPP), of which he became director in 2013, and which became the Swiss Plasma Center in 2015 Fasoli was responsible for several years for EPFL's
TCV Tokamak, one of the national facilities in Europe participating in the research for the international reactor ITER In 2008, Fasoli was elected as a Fellow of the
American Physical Society. Since 2001, he has been a visiting professor in the Department of Physics at MIT From 2010 through 2014, he was the Head of Physics Strategic Committee, and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL Basic Science Faculty. Since 1 January 2019, he is the chair of the European consortium
EUROfusion, the umbrella organization of Europe's fusion laboratories. He has developed a
Massive open online course (MOOC) dedicated to fusion and plasma physics, with several thousand registrations each year.
Scientific contributions Fasoli works in the areas of basic
plasma physics, burning plasma physics, and
tokamak physics. At the Swiss Plasma Center, located at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), he has founded and led the basic plasmas research group, and built the TORPEX facility. He was responsible for the
TCV tokamak, the experimental fusion reactor, for several years. plasma physics and nuclear fusion. At MIT, (1997-2001), he founded and led the plasma physics research group, constructing the
Versatile Toroidal Facility (VTF) experiment to study the physics of magnetic reconnection, and coordinated the international scientific collaboration between MIT and JET. As a researcher at JET, he initiated a series of experiments on the interaction between plasma particles and
Alfvén waves, of interest to fusion reactor plasmas. He participated in 1997 in the experiments that still hold the record for fusion power generated for peaceful purposes by a plasma on earth == Selected works ==