MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Nuclear Science and Engineering is an intellectually exciting and socially important discipline, supporting a wide range of applications.

Our department presently consists of 28 faculty and senior research staff, 101 graduate and 48 undergraduate students. The curriculum includes over 70 subjects of instructon, leading to the B.S., M.S., N.E., and Ph.D. degrees. Our goal is to educate individuals to become future leaders and make fundamental contributions in each of the following three programs:

• Fission Engineering and Nuclear Energy
• Fusion and Plasma Physics
• Nuclear Science and Technology

Research opportunities extend across all aspects of nuclear science and engineering. enhanced by the use of world-class experimental facilities located on campus, including:

• MITR-II, a 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor;
• Alcator C-Mod, a high field tokamak fusion device;
• Multi-accelerator laboratory, focusing on medical and industrial applications; and
• Multi-magnet nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory, focusing on medical imaging and quantum information processing.

Students also have access to state-of-the-art computational facilities.

Background

Established in 1958, the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT is one of the oldest Nuclear Science and Engineering graduate programs in the country. Still, compared to more traditional engineering disciplines, nuclear engineering is a relatively new addition to university educational programs. The field defines its education and research mission broadly as the study of nuclear and radiation interactions and their applications to problems of beneficial interest to society. Given that we have only recently begun to understand basic nuclear processes, nuclear engineering is still in its "pioneering" phase with regard to its impact on our lives.