Rad IDEAS group

We are very excited to be recognized as a top 3 program!

The Department of Nuclear Engineering is proud to announce its rise into the top three in national recognition in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2025 rankings of top graduate schools! Nuclear engineering moved up three spots to rank No. 2 among public engineering schools and No. 3 nationally, the department's highest ranking ever. Head to the link to learn more about the recognition!

🔗 https://bit.ly/43GYBWJ

Postdoctoral researcher Alicia Kyle, ORNL collaborators Kyle Schmitt and Klaus Ziock, PhD student Daniel Koch, and ORNL collaborator Alex Laminack are collaborating on initial testing of a gamma imaging experiment in UT Nuclear Engineering's Accelerator Research Center (ARC).

Congratulations to David Raji of the RadIDEAS group! David passed his PhD defense on his dissertation "Multi-Objective Radiological Analysis in Real Environments." The work was conducted in collaboration with the Applied Nuclear Physics Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has accepted a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory this summer. Other PhD graduates from this group at PNNL include Carl Britt, J.R. Powers-Luhn, Angela Moore, and Michael Moore.

🎊 Congratulations 🥳 to Mairead Montague for passing her PhD dissertation defense on "Characterization of a Proof-of-Concept Imager to Safeguard Spent Nuclear Fuel Using Passive Fast Neutron Emission Tomography."

She will be headed up to conduct postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Science as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Radiation Detection.

UT Leads $25 Million Nuclear Technology Consortium - Tickle College of Engineering The University of Tennessee is the lead institution for a $25 million cooperative agreement awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation.

This past week PhD student Daniel Koch and Professor and UCOR Fellow Jason Hayward teamed up with Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s Josh Cates and Ryan Heller to make Gamma LiDAR measurements at the Idaho Accelerator Center. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) based on lasers functions as the eyes of self driving cars. With today’s newest fast gamma detectors, they perform LiDAR using penetrating X-rays that can see through dense surfaces. That’s a rad idea!

For more info on some early work on this topic, check out Hayward’s Rad IDEAS group’s 2014 and 2015 publications on this topic from work at the same facility: https://radideas.utk.edu/peer-reviewed-publications/

https://news.utk.edu/2024/07/01/ut-leads-25m-nuclear-technology-consortium/

UT Leads $25M Nuclear Technology Consortium UT is the lead institution of a $25 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy that will support its nuclear security and nonproliferation research.

Young Named Winner of December Student Service Award | Department of Nuclear Engineering UT nuclear engineering student Christian Young was named winner of the department’s December student service award.

Karen Koop Hogue | Radiation Instrumentation (Rad IDEAS) Group Karen Koop Hogue NNIS and SEC FellowBiographyKaren's primary research interests relate to developing and improving verification technologies and approaches in support of advanced nuclear reactor safeguards. Karen currently works as an R&D Staff Engineer in the Verification Technologies group at Oak....

Dr. Hayward with the NE 532 class and the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium students visited the ORNL Safeguards lab on Monday of this week to perform laboratories in radiation portal monitoring, nuclear holdup estimation, uranium enrichment measurements, and neutron counting.