Dr. Zhang was awarded the prestigious American Nuclear Society Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award and recognized for pioneering work in nuclear cybersecurity and AI/ML, including landmark collaborations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and research in robotic monitoring for nuclear safety and security.
“I would like to thank all my students, colleagues, collaborators, and mentors who supported me throughout the journey. I wouldn’t be here without all of you and our great nuclear community American Nuclear Society. I would like to thank U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who fund all these innovative research nuclear cybersecurity, AI/ML, Robotics to allow us bring ideas to reality.”
We wrapped up a successful week at ICRA 2025 in Atlanta 🎉. Highlights from the conference:
📢 Workshop leadership: At “Grand Challenges in Robotics for Nuclear Environments: A Call to Action”, Dr. Zhang served as Publication Chair, and our team presented 4 poster papers.
🏆 Best Poster Award:Hojoon Son
🧭 Lab tour: We welcomed visitors to iFAN Lab; many nuclear robotics researchers left inspired by our work.
🤖 Expo demo: We showcased our physics‑centric multimodal perception robot.
Looking forward to even bigger achievements at the next ICRA 🚀.
Our inaugural Nuclear Cybersecurity Workshop was a tremendous success, with over 50 attendees joining us for a day of insightful discussions and presentations on nuclear cybersecurity.
Our keynote speaker, Dr. Rian Bahran, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), delivered powerful remarks on the critical importance of cybersecurity in nuclear energy. Another keynote speaker, Mitchell Hewes, Information and Computer Security Officer at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), emphasized the strong collaboration between Georgia Tech and IAEA in the field of nuclear cybersecurity. Speakers from Idaho National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Southern Nuclear, Sentinel Devices, universities, and our own students and researchers presents advanced research and capabilities for collaboration. Some in attendance even said they wished we had more hours in the day – the discussion and collaboration were that good!
Many thanks to all of the people who supported this workshop and made it great! Together, we are making great strides in securing the future of nuclear energy. 🌟 We would also like to thank the support from Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute, and Georgia Tech College of Engineering, and our great staff members!
Special thanks to all the co-leads for their supports and dedication: Dr. Steve Biegalski, Dr. Valerie Thomas, Dr. Guenevere Qian Chen, Dr.Alexander Miranda, and Dr. Christine Conwell!
This February, we celebrated the incredible achievements and innovations of our undergraduate students in the fields of cybersecurity, process monitoring and diagnostic, autonomous control, and robotics. 🎉 We celebrated the Best Paper Award 🏆 and PURA Awards 🥇
We took time to reflect on the amazing work we’ve accomplished together and discussed how we can further support our undergraduates in their research and career development. We also identified the resources needed to continue fostering their growth and success.
A huge thank you to all our undergraduates for their hard work and dedication. Your contributions are invaluable, and we are excited to see what the future holds for each of you!
