ITER Council has appointed Dr. Pietro Barabaschi as the next Director-General of the ITER Organization. Following the unfortunate passing away of former Director-General Dr. Bernard Bigot in May 2022, the ITER Council had launched a search and recruitment effort to select his successor. In its extraordinary meeting in Paris in September 2022, Dr. Pietro Barabaschi was unanimously appointed as the next Director-General to lead the ITER Project.
Pietro Barabaschi has been, since 2009, the Head of the R&D Department in Fusion-for-Energy (F4E), which is responsible for delivery of European components to the ITER and also for Broader Approach Fusion international projects. He has been specifically responsible for the European contributions to the three projects implemented in the frame of the Broader
Approach Agreement between Euratom and the government of Japan: JT60SA (a large tokamak), IFMIF/EVEDA (a large linear accelerator) and IFERC (a joint EU/JA R&D center). During 2015, and again in 2022, he operated as Acting Director of F4E.
Before joining F4E and up to early 2006, he was the deputy to the Project Leader and head of the Design Integration Division of the ITER International Team at the Munich Joint Work Site. Earlier, he had worked in the JET tokamak in UK, where he worked in the machine development department.
Dr. Barabaschi is expected to take office in October 2022.