Katy Huff

Dr. Kathryn D. Huff serves as the Acting Assistant Secretary and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy. Prior to her current role, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. She was also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Before joining the Department of Energy, Dr. Huff was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group and taught reactor theory and the future of energy. She was also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California - Berkeley.

Dr. Huff received her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013 and her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago. Her research focused on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles.

She is an active member of the American Nuclear Society, Chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division, a past chair of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and recipient of both the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women's Achievement awards. Through leadership within Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Hacker Within, and the Journal of Open Source Software, she also advocates for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnsOPodptHQ&t=86s

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Sources:

University of Illinois Alumni: In Class Power Source: Nuclear engineer Katy Huff on teaching with IPythons, reactor theory and the future of energy
DOE Office of Nuclear Energy: Dr. Kathryn Huff, Senior Advisor, Office of the Secretary.

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID

March 21, 2022

Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar

Mary Lou is the associate dean of the Idaho State University (ISU) College of Science and a senior reactor operator at ISU’s Aerojet-General Nucleonics nuclear reactor. She was the 66th president of the American Nuclear Society (from 2020 to 2021, and the fifth woman to be elected in ANS history), and her research projects on nuclear energy are published internationally.

It was a high school teacher who introduced chemistry and physics to Mary Lou in a way that made those subjects come alive and influenced her to major in chemistry. But growing up in Millersburg, PA, about 40 miles from Three Mile Island, at the time of the TMI-2 accident in March 1979, also had a profound effect on her. Rather than turn her off to nuclear power, TMI-2 convinced her to do something nuclear-related.

Dunzik-Gougar matriculated at Penn State in 1994, setting her sights on a master’s degree in environmental engineering and received her master’s degree from Penn State in 1997 under the supervision of Prof. Barry Scheetz, who guided her creation of a waste form for spent fuel processing calcines at Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). In 1997, she had a summer internship at Argonne National Laboratory–West, which was merged with INEEL in 2005 to become Idaho National Laboratory. This led to an opportunity to return to Argonne-West to conduct research focused on processing fuel from the sodium-cooled fast spectrum Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) and modeling the use of zeolite to remove fission products from the molten salt used to process the fuel. Unfortunately, the EBR-II was shut down in 1994 when the Clinton administration removed funding for the Integral Fast Reactor program and she arrived at Idaho just a few years after EBR-II closed, and saw the effect the program’s loss had on Argonne employees.

Dunzik-Gougar received her nuclear engineering Ph.D. in December 2003, a took a job teaching at Idaho State University. At around that time, Argonne-West merged with INEEL to become Idaho National Laboratory. Dunzik-Gougar found herself working with INL’s Kamal Pasamehmetoglu on a lab-directed research and development project creating a fuel cycle model from first principles. After Pasamehmetoglu was pulled into other tasks, Dunzik-Gougar took over administration of the project, called SINEMA (Simulation Institute for Nuclear Enterprise Modeling and Analysis).Soon after, she found herself working in South Africa with their Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), a venture established in 1999 to build and demonstrate a small-scale helium-cooled high-temperature reactor. There she worked to help PBMR and the University of Pretoria in setting up a lab to study irradiated graphite for PBMR’s waste minimization program. This led to her work on a European Union–funded project focusing on the decontamination of radioactive graphite, as well as work on a Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) project, when she returned to Idaho. Dunzik-Gougar has since also worked as a consultant to Électricité de France on irradiated graphite waste treatment.Dunzik-Gougar served as acting chair of the university’s Nuclear Engineering and Health Physics Department and as the associate dean of the College of Science and Engineering. She also serves as the reactor administrator for ISU’s AGN-201 reactor, and became an NRC-licensed reactor operator and senior reactor operator. Dunzik-Gougar is still doing active research, having been awarded a NEUP grant in October 2019 to develop a method of testing the tensile strength of TRISO fuel particle layers.

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Source:

ANS: "Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar: A passion for teaching" July 15, 2020, published in Nuclear News.
Tomorrow's World Today, "Five of the Most Important Women in Nuclear Science."

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID

March 1, 2022

Rita Baranwal

Dr. Rita Baranwal is the Chief Nuclear Officer at Radiant, a Nucleation portfolio company that pioneers the world’s first mass-produced portable nuclear microreactor. She brings decades of leadership in nuclear innovation, policy, and engineering.

Dr. Rita Baranwal was nominated by the President to serve as the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy (ONE) and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on June 20, 2019 (by a vote of 86 to 5), becoming the first woman to ever lead the Office of Nuclear Energy.

In that role, Dr. Baranwal directed programs to promote research and development (R&D) on existing and advanced nuclear technologies that sustain the existing U.S. fleet of nuclear reactors, enable the deployment of advanced nuclear energy systems, support nuclear technology for space and defense applications, and enhance the U.S.A.'s global commercial nuclear energy competitiveness. She also:

Launched innovative programs to demonstrate advanced nuclear reactor designs, launched a new U.S. reactor innovation center, and a unique private-public partnership to develop new U.S. nuclear testing capabilities
Collaborated with U.S. intergovernmental agencies (e.g. Departments of State, Commerce, and Treasury, National Security Council, Office of Science & Technology Policy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Development Finance Corporation) to globally deploy new U.S. civil nuclear technology.
Implemented civil nuclear agreements with two countries; initiated civil nuclear agreement discussions with eleven countries.
Partnered with NASA on nuclear technology and expertise for space exploration. Contributed to the National Strategy for Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion, Executive Order on Reactors for Space Exploration, and DOE’s Space Strategy.
Managed Congressionally-enacted budget of $1.5B (FY20).
Served as the Equity in Energy Champion for DOE’s Office of Economic Impact and Diversity.

Following her service as the #1 at ONE, Dr. Baranwal served as the VP of Nuclear and Chief Nuclear Officer for the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) for over a year. As of 2022, Dr. Baranwal has returned to Westinghouse as the Chief Technology Officer.

Prior to her appointment to the ONE, Dr. Baranwal served as the director for the DOE's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) since 2016, an initiative hosted at Idaho National Laboratory. GAIN is the way the U.S. Government connects industry with national laboratories to help commercialize nuclear technologies. Under her leadership, GAIN positively impacted 112 projects and companies.

Before that, Dr. Baranwal worked for Westinghouse in the nuclear fuel division, leading a number of research and development programs. She started her career at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory helping to develop advanced nuclear fuel materials for US naval reactors.

Dr. Baranwal has a bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in materials science and engineering and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in the same discipline from the University of Michigan.

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Sources:

LinkedIn: Dr. Rita Baranwal
NayaFace: Rita Baranwal sworn in as 1st woman US Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at DOE, July 25, 2019.

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Venture capital support for nuclear, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID