On Tuesday, April 25, Christopher Morrison presented his doctoral work entitled “Improving Prompt Doppler Feedback Using Micro-Engineered Heterogeneous Composite Matrix Nuclear Fuel”. His doctoral committee approved, and he is set to graduate officially in August.

Three members of R-NEAMS have successfully defended their master’s theses and are set to graduate in May.

Three members of the Rensselaer NEAMS research group attended the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting which was held November 6-10 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This week, reactor staff and students celebrated 60 years of operation at the Walthousen Reactor Critical Facility. The RCF first achieved criticality on August 26, 1956. At the time it was owned by the American Locomotive Company.

Jaron Senecal has been awarded a Second Place prize in the Innovations in Fuel Cycle Research Awards sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Fuel Cycle Technologies. Jaron’s award is in the Open Competition in the category of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

The biennial Physics of Reactors (PHYSOR) conference was held in Sun Valley, Idaho from May 1 to 6. The NEAMS research group was very active at the conference. Dr. Ji was the lead session organizer for the Multiphysics Reactor Simulations technical track which consisted of over 30 presentations.

Chris Morrison and Jaron Senecal earned their Senior Reactor Operator licenses at RPI’s Walthousen Reactor Critical Facility (RCF).

On November 6, Andrew Pavlou successfully defended his dissertation, “An Adaptive-in-Temperature Method for On-the-Fly Sampling of Thermal Neutron Scattering Data in Continuous-Energy Monte Carlo Codes.” Andrew is Dr. Ji’s third student to receive a Ph.D. in three years. Dr.

This year the American Nuclear Society’s Winter Meeting was held in Washington D.C.

Chris Morrison attended the Fuel Cycle Technologies Meeting in Idaho Falls. He presented a poster titled, “Fault Tolerant Composite Matrix Fuels for Terrestrial and Space Applications.”