Congratulations! Dr. Fan Zhang, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the lab director of the iFAN lab, has been awarded a Distinguished Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE). Her awards of $625,000 over five years will provide support for her and the lab to develop a robot-assisted online monitoring and maintenance system for nuclear reactors. Her project will integrate a nuclear power plant (NPP) digital twin with data from a pressurized water reactor (PWR) simulator to enable robotic navigation and manipulation research, and will be used to develop algorithms for autonomous fault detection, diagnosis, and risk assessment integrating robot assistance.
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Faculty Spotlight: Fan Zhang
Welcome! Assistant Professor Fan Zhang joined the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering on July 1 as a member of the nuclear and radiological engineering program. Before coming, she worked as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), where she got her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering and a concurrent M.S. degree in Statistics. She joined Georgia Tech as a faculty member to stay in academia and contribute to science and technology within one of the best NRE programs and a fantastic and inclusive campus. Her research focuses on instrumentation and control (I&C), which includes online monitoring, diagnostics, prognostics, cybersecurity, autonomous control, and advanced sensing technology. She is designing and building two test beds in the iFAN lab, where one is an experimental flow loop with industrial network architecture and the other is a hardware-in-the-loop advanced full scope simulation test bed.
Dr. Fan Zhang Wins Early Career Award from ANS
Congratulations! Dr. Fan Zhang is the recipient of the 2021 Ted Quinn Early Career Award from the American Nuclear Society (ANS) based on her outstanding achievements and dedication to the industry. During her doctoral student years, her research gained international attention from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for her new approach for enhancing cybersecurity within nuclear power plants. She continues active engagement in the global community, including being involved in the IAEA NucSecCyber webinar Series 2.