Thomas Clayson

Dr Thomas Clayson is founder and CTO of Magdrive, UK based start-up developing the next generation of spacecraft propulsion. Thomas completed his PhD in plasma laboratory astrophysics at Imperial College London, where he also served as president of the Imperial College Robotics Society. He played a key role at VC backed fusion pioneers First Light Fusion, to design and build the largest pulsed power machine in Europe for nuclear fusion experiments.

In 2019 he founded Magdrive and, with his cofounder Mark Stokes, have raised $5M, with their seed led by Founders Fund (key investors in SpaceX). The company has since grown to 11 people and is launching their first space mission this year. Thomas has worked with innovate UK tech companies including Astroscale, RACE robotics, Tokamak Energy and Shadow Robotics, and international organizations such as SIOM (Shanghai institute of optics and fine mechanics) and Observatoire de Paris. Thomas has been invited to present work in Europe, the US, Japan, China and published over 20 research papers.