Research Overview

Nuclear energy has become essential to decarbonize the world’s economy. Advanced reactors and propulsion concepts are expected to operate much higher temperatures and irradiation doses compared to current fleet of light water reactors. Developing advanced materials that can satisfactorily perform for the reactor lifetime under these extreme conditions is critical for successful deployment of advanced reactor. Discovering and developing high-performance structural materials and accident tolerance fuels remains a grand challenge. Our overarching research goal is to address this challenge by improving exiting materials and engineering new ones using coupled experiments, atomistic simulations and data science in ways that provide atomic to mesoscale level understanding that informs the rational design of these materials while gaining mechanistic understanding of materials behavior under normal and off-normal reactor conditions.