Nuclear Science and Engineering Annual Awards 2012The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the student chapter of the American Nuclear Society hosted their Awards Dinner on May 17, 2011. The event attended by students, faculty and their guests was an evening of celebration and recognition of exceptional contribution and achievement by members of the Department. Meet the award winners |
NSE graduate students Black, Boyd, Shaner win NEUP Fellowships
First-year graduate students Brad Black, William Dawson and Samuel Shaner in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT are among 31 graduate students across the country who have won fellowships through the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP). Brad Black is working with Professor Ron Ballinger on the development of a probabilistic model for the lifetime of spent fuel storage canisters. With the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, spent nuclear fuel is being held indefinitely in storage canisters across the country. At present there is no good way to predict the life and durability of these canisters. Black’s research will be focused on studying the salt-rich environments of the various sites and on their potential to initiate stress corrosion cracking, particularly in the heat-affected zones of welds. “The goal,” says Black, “is to develop a model of the time to canister failure based on environmental, electrochemical, and material parameters, with minimal uncertainty, in order to provide guidance to future research and policy decisions.” William Robert Dawson Boyd III has been working with Professor Kord Smith on the development of a deterministic neutron transport code, OpenMOC, which implements the method-of-characteristics. The goal is to use the code as a framework to develop, deploy, and analyze new acceleration techniques for neutron transport calculations. In particular, Boyd is working on an implementation of a graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated version of OpenMOC. This new code will make use of the massively parallel hardware available through GPUs which are becoming increasingly pervasive in today's personal computers and workstations. Samuel Shaner works with Professors Kord Smith and Benoit Forget in the rapidly growing field of computational modeling in nuclear engineering. “My interests lie in computational modeling of fully coupled neutronic and thermomechanical processes” says Shaner. Due to the inherently multidisciplinary nature of such problems and the complexity of coupling fundamentally different processes, current analysis has been limited to simplified physical representations. These simulations are crucial to demonstrating the safety of nuclear reactors and accurately modeling material behavior. The DOE’s NEUP fellowships provide students with financial support to pursue a degree in the nuclear field and gain the skills and experiences they need to succeed in a nuclear science and engineering career. Each fellow will receive $50,000 annually over the next three years in addition to a summer internship at a National Laboratory. The selected students will study a range of critical nuclear energy issues, from fuel cycle sustainability to reactor efficiency and design. "The NEUP fellowships are awarded competitively, so winning one is a honor that reflects positively on the winners as well as on MIT,” says NSE Professor Jacopo Buongiorno. “Moreover, these fellowships provide the students with a certain degree of freedom in selecting a research project, and also alleviate the financial aid burden on the Department." A fourth student, Geoffrey Gunow, who will enroll in NSE at MIT in September, was awarded a NEUP fellowship while still a student at the University of Michigan. Gunow hopes to bring his fellowship with him to continue his studies in reactor physics and advanced computational methods at MIT. Photos: top left: Brad Black; bottom left: Samuel Shaner; right: William Dawson |
Mareena Robinson wins prestigious Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship
“The holistic focus on developing students into skilled and insightful researchers in the area of stewardship science is what initially intrigued me about this fellowship.” said Robinson. “My goal in my graduate and broader professional career is to continue to advance my technical and political intuition through diverse experiences. I firmly believe that diversity of experiences and backgrounds is essential to the development of the next wave of innovative nuclear security solutions. I am excited to contribute my perspective on prevalent issues regarding nuclear security and to be exposed to other perspectives through my interaction with the fellowship.” Robinson’s research currently focuses on the detection and measurement of radiopharmaceuticals, specifically N-13 ammonia, which is used as a tracer in Positron Emission Tomography. Using a compact high-field superconducting cyclotron, N-13 ammonia will be produced through high-energy proton collisions with O-16. Robinson’s role in the research is to develop a flow-through detection system that measures the amount and activity of the N-13 ammonia produced by this system. This research, once complete, will have immediate applications to the medical industry. Robinson graduated with a B.S. in Physics from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, FL, in 2011. |
Two NSE graduate students win awards at 2012 ANS Student Conference
Mark Reed won two awards: First-year graduate student, Elliot Fray (with help from Brad Black) won an award for his presentation entitled "Self-Catalytic Alloys for Hydrogen / Oxygen Recombination in Light Water Reactors". Elliott has been selected to present this work to scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory later this year. Photo: Mark Reed at the 2012 ANS Student Conference. |
NSE junior Cameron McCord wins Truman Scholarship
McCord is majoring in both nuclear engineering and physics, and is a student in the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program, as well as a member of a Navy ROTC unit. He has worked at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Brookhaven National Laboratory and plans to pursue a career in nuclear energy safety and nuclear nonproliferation. more Photo: Harry Truman Foundation |
NSE's Clarice Aiello wins Schlumberger Foundation fellowship
The long-term goal of the Program is to generate conditions that result in more women pursuing scientific disciplines. Grant recipients are therefore selected as much for their leadership capabilities as for their scientific talents, and they are expected to return to their home countries to continue their academic careers and inspire other young women. At MIT Aiello is working with NSE Professor Paola Cappellaro toward achieving high-fidelity control of electronic and nuclear spins associated with the Nitrogen-Vacancy defect center in diamond. The goal of her research is to manipulate these spins using optical and microwave fields in order to use them as quantum bits for quantum information processing and precision measurements. The Faculty for the Future community now stands at 194 women from 54 countries, and grows steadily each year Photo: Clarice Aiello at the 2011 NSE Doctoral Research Expo. |
In April 2012, Mareena Robinson was one of five students awarded the prestigious 
MIT was represented by 13 NSE students at the annual ANS Student Conference held in Las Vegas this year. Graduate students Mark Reed and Elloitt Fray won awards for their presentations.
NSE junior Cameron McCord is among the 54 students recently awarded Harry S. Truman Scholarships for 2012. The scholarships include $30,000 for graduate study for those committed to careers in government or the non-profit sector.
Nuclear Science and Engineering PhD student Clarice Aiello has been selected to receive a Schlumberger Foundation