April 28 Presentations

Bernard Kippelen is the Joseph M. Pettit Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. His research interests range from the investigation of fundamental physical processes (nonlinear optical activity, charge transport, light harvesting and emission) in organic-based nanostructured thin films, to the design, fabrication and testing of light-weight flexible optoelectronic devices based on hybrid printable materials. He is a co-founder and co-President of the Institut Lafayette, an innovation platform located on Georgia Tech’s European campus Georgia Tech Lorraine (Metz, France).

Chuck is the Director the Scintillation Materials Research Center at the University of Tennessee and holds research faculty appointments in both the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee. He has 35+ years of combined academic and industrial experience in the scintillator field, including both research and manufacturing responsibilities. He is best known for the invention and industrial development of the LSO scintillator that is now widely used for positron emission tomography (PET). He has authored or co-authored ~200 journal articles with >5000 citations, three book chapters, and several invited review articles. He is the inventor or co-inventor on 24 U.S. patents. He was chosen as the 2006 recipient of the IEEE Merit Award and was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014. He has served on a number of DOE, DHS, and NSF review panels.

Dr. L. Raymond Cao is a Professor in the Nuclear Engineering Program at The Ohio State University and the Director of OSU-Nuclear Reactor Lab. Dr. Cao received PhD degree in Nuclear and Radiation Engineering Program from University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Prior to joining OSU, Dr. Cao was a research associate at the Center for Neutron Research, U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and also received a 9-months training at the Positron Emission Tomography Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. At OSU, Dr. Cao founded the Nuclear Analysis and Radiation Sensor laboratory (NARS) in 2010. Dr. Cao’s major research interests focus on radiation sensor development, in-pile instrumentation, and nuclear methods (PGNAA, NDP, neutron radiography/tomography). Dr. Cao has published ~150 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings. Dr. Cao serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science and the editorial board of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Professor Andy Boston is a Nuclear Physicist based at the Department of Physics at the University of Liverpool. He is an expert in the use of gamma-ray detector arrays. His profile stems from fundamental research into the structure of nuclei. He is the Liverpool Principal Investigator for the Advanced Gamma Tracking Array (AGATA) funded project which is delivering a major upgrade to the sensitivity of the European AGATA spectrometer. He is the UK member of the AGATA management board leading the working group responsible for Pulse Shape Analysis and detector characterization. He is also the UK Principal Investigator for the Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless double beta Decay (LEGEND) collaboration which is developing a next-generation neutrinoless double-beta decay (0νββ) experiment based on High Purity Germanium detectors. His work is underpinned by the development of state-of-the-art instrumentation with a research group that are leaders in the use of silicon, germanium and cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) semiconductor sensors.

Zhong He received his Ph.D from Southampton University in U.K. in 1993. His research has covered all three major types of radiation sensors, including semiconductors, scintillators, gas detectors, and associated low noise, charge sensing Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). Since 1995, his research has focused mostly on the development of room-temperature semiconductor gamma-ray imaging spectrometers. He pioneered the 3-dimensional position-sensitive single-polarity charge sensing technology which has attracted sustained interests in national security, nuclear non-proliferation, homeland security, nuclear power industry, medical imaging, and planetary sciences. He has graduated 31 Ph.Ds as committee chair and has published more than 110 peer-reviewed journal publications. H3D Inc., a spin-off company from his research group, has sold CdZnTe gamma-ray imagers to more than 75% of nuclear power plants in the United States and Canada, as well as many in Europe and Asia, to IAEA Safeguard Department, DOE National Laboratories and university research groups.

Kai Vetter is Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and Faculty Senior Scientist and heads the Applied Nuclear Physics program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His main research interests are in the development and demonstration of new concepts and technologies in radiation detection to address some of the outstanding challenges in fundamental sciences, nuclear security, and health. He has authored and co-authored about 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and is fellow of the American Physical Society. He received Presidential Citations from the American Nuclear Society twice, for his engagement in Fukushima through measurements and enhancing community resilience. For over ten years, he has been exploring means to map and visualize radiation in 3D from freely moving platforms which not only provides unprecedented speed and accuracy relevant for radiological safety and nuclear security but provides new ways in the communication with the public.

Igor Jovanovic received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a staff physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a professor at Purdue University and Penn State University. At the University of Michigan, he is a Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences and Professor of Applied Physics. He serves as the Associate Director for National Laboratories of the Monitoring, Technology, and Verification Consortium. He has served as the Chair and Program Chair of Isotopes and Radiation Division of the American Nuclear Society. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM). He authored over 120 journal publications in radiation detection, nuclear security, optics, plasmas, and laser physics, and was issued five U.S. patents.

Stephen McLaughlin obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Glasgow in 1981 and the Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh in 1990. From 1981 to 1986 he was a Development Engineer in industry. In 1986 he joined the Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and ultimately held a Chair in Electronic Communication Systems. In October 2011 he joined Heriot-Watt University as a Professor of Signal Processing. Prof McLaughlin is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, of the IEEE and is a EURASIP Fellow.

David Carlson is an Assistant Professor at Duke University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. His research is focused on developing machine learning methods to facilitate data-driven science, primarily using probabilistic and deep learning approaches. He has previously published on a wide range of algorithmic problems, including efficient inference, stochastic optimization, and interpretable models. He is particularly interested in applying these techniques to develop testable hypotheses and design confirmatory experiments, which has resulted in applications in several areas across engineering and health.

Prof. Hosemann’s career started at the Montanuniversitaet Leoben in Austria where he received his PhD and MS degree in material science. He joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2005 as a graduate research assistant and continued as a Post doc from 2008-2010 before joining UC Berkeley’s nuclear engineering department. He had numerous research stays at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland and Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research features experimental material science for extreme environments especially nuclear environments. His focus is on structural materials used for nuclear components (fission, fusion, spallation, etc.) while developing a basic understanding of the materials degradation processes and resulting consequences to engineering application.

Prof. Sunil S. Chirayath is the director of the Texas A&M Center for Nuclear Security Science and Policy Initiatives (NSSPI) since June 2015 and also serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He conducts research in the area of nuclear security and nonproliferation. He manages the nuclear forensics laboratory in the department of nuclear engineering. He has over 200 technical publications in refereed journals (over 50) and national/international conference proceedings (over 150). He has over 30 years of experience in nuclear science and engineering field and has worked in various positions in academia and industry. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM).