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Laboratory for Advanced Nuclear Nonproliferation and Safety

Laboratory for Advanced Nuclear Nonproliferation and Safety

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Group Leader

 

Anna Erickson, Professor

 

 


Research Engineer

 

Yuguo Tao, PhD

 

 


Research Technician

 

David Straub

 

 


Graduate Researchers

Caiser Bravo

Corinne Hill

Elizabeth Apalkova

 

 

Erick Lassair

 

 

Gracie Eccleston

 

 

Lucas McKown

 

 

Mackenzie Duce

 

 

Natalie Cannon

 

 

Shae Cole

Undergraduate Researchers

Alexander Whitesides

 

Alma Merchant

 

Brett Lowry

 

 

Christopher Walk


 

Derek Lewis

 

 

Jenna Crawford

 

 

Johan Gouws

Margaret Fontaine

Pierre O’Driscoll

Alumni

— by graduation year

 

2024

Matthew Dunbrack (PhD)

Dissertation: Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Antineutrino-based Nuclear Reactor Safeguards

Current Appointment: He is now a Computational Physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Ian Schreiber (MS)

Thesis: Uncertainty Quantification of a Novel Method of Void Fraction Assay in Molten Salt Reactors

Current Appointment: Ian is now a Medical Physics Resident at the CARTI Cancer Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

 

2023

Patience Yockey (MS)

Thesis: Cyber-resilience of machine learning-based digital twins for reactor autonomous control systems

Current Appointment: Patience is now a Data Scientist at Idaho National Laboratory. 

 

2022

Arith Rajapakse (PhD / Postdoctoral Researcher)

Dissertation: Sensing the Interactions of Ionizing Radiation in a Semiconductor Substrate using Carbon Nanotubes

Current Appointment: He is now a Medical Physics Resident at Harvard Medical School. 

 

Nick Fassino (PhD)

Dissertation: Expanding the Operating Envelopes of Advanced Reactors with Multi-Metallic Layered Composite Materials

Current Appointment: He is now a Postdoc at Argonne National Laboratory. 

 

Warren Erling (MS)

Thesis: A Comprehensive Study on Detector Modeling, Reactor Core Environment Analysis, and Fuel Burnup for the Lifespan of the Molten Salt Research Reactor

Current Appointment: He is now a Reactor Inspector at U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

 

Jonathan Arrue (MS)

Thesis: Polysiloxane Organic Scintillators for Neutron and Gamma Detection via Pulse Shape Discrimination

Current Appointment: He is now a Medical Physics Resident at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.

 

Jonah Cullen (MS)

Thesis: Survey of Machine Learning Methods for Reactor Burnup Prediction

Current Appointment: He is now a Nuclear Engineer at X-energy. 

Austin Cournoyer (UG Research Assistant)

 

2020

Wesley Gillis (PhD)

Dissertation: Elemental Mass Quantification from Spectral X-Ray Radiographs and Fluorescence using Gauss-Newton and Deep Learning Approaches

Current Appointment: He is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College. 

 

Luke Maloney (PhD)

Dissertation: Characterization of Algorithms and Performance of a Fine-Resolution Active Interrogation System

Current Appointment: He is now an Assistant Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Florida (click here). 

 

2019

Andrew Conant (PhD)

Dissertation: Antineutrino Spectrum Characterization of the High Flux Isotope Reactor Using Neutronic Simulations

Current Appointment: He is now a R&D nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (click here). 

 

2018

Joseph Harms (PhD)

Dissertation: Modeling and Characterization of a Monoenergetic Gamma-Ray Imaging System for Active Interrogation Applications

Current Appointment: He is now a Assistant Professor at The University of Alabama at Birmingham (click here).

Michael Reilly (UG Research Assistant)

David Raji (UG Research Assistant)

 

2017

Abdalla Abou Jaoude (PhD)

Dissertation: Design of a mixed-spectrum long-lived reactor with improved proliferation resistance

Current Appointment: He is now a R&D Staff Scientist in the Advanced Reactor Technology Department of Idaho National Laboratory (click here). 

 

Paul B. Rose Jr. (PhD/Postdoctoral Researcher)

Dissertation: Imaging of special nuclear materials using monochromatic gamma rays from low-energy nuclear reactions

Current Appointment: He is now a R&D Staff Scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (click here). 

Evan Redd (PhD)

Evan’s research was on sensitivity and uncertainty methods in nuclear forensics.

Luke Maloney (MS)

Thesis: Design of an x-ray CT system with implementation of sparse-data reconstruction

2016

Chris L. Stewart (PhD)

Chris’ dissertation was in safeguards applications for near-field antineutrino detectors, particularly for monitoring fast reactors with long-life cores.  He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley working with Bethany Goldblum on hardware characterization and analytics development for a multi-modal networked sensor array tasked with detection of proliferation-relevant activity.

Current Appointment: He is now a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California – Berkeley. 

 

Jessica Saunders (PhD)

Jessica’s dissertation focused on detection of prompt gammas for proton range verification in proton radiotherapy. She is currently a medical physics resident at Navy Medical Center Portsmouth.

Current Appointment: She is now a Medical Physicist/Radiation Health Officer at the US Navy. 

Martin Zavala  (MS)

Martin’s thesis project was on the use of robotics in radiation detection for incident and nonproliferation events. This project was carried out in collaboration with the Guggenheim School of Aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.

Current Appointment: He is currently a Technology Consulting Manager at Accenture LLC.

Mike Meier (MS)

Mike’s thesis research was focused on development of a modified inorganic neutron detector.  The new detector is be focused on the detection of Special Nuclear Materials to prevent weapons proliferation, but has other applications in nuclear power and fuel cycle research.

Current Appointment: He is now a Nuclear Research Officer at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. 

2015

Paul Rose (MS)

Thesis: Cherenkov detectors for transmission studies of monoenergetic high-energy photons in active interrogation applications

Andrew Conant (MS)

Thesis: Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analysis of Plutonium and Cesium Isotope Ratios in BR3 Core 4A/B Fuel Rod

Evan Redd (MS)

Thesis: X-10 reactor forensic analysis and evaluation using a suite of neutron transport codes

Benjamin Musall (UG research assistant)

Ben was working with Jessica Saunders to research methods of improving proton computed tomography. He graduated with BS in 2015. Ben is currently at MD Andersen studying medical physics.

2014

Puvithel Rajan (UG research assistant)

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