The school year is now well under way, and we have welcomed another excellent group of new undergraduate and graduate students to the Department.
We have also welcomed our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor Michael Short, who joined us in July. As Mike likes to remind us, though, he has been connected to the Department since 1998, when he first started visiting us as a high school sophomore! Not surprisingly, with both undergraduate and graduate degrees from NSE Mike has hit the ground running. His research is in the field of nuclear materials science and engineering, and you can learn more about it here.
Prof. Short joins an outstanding group of NSE faculty working in materials-related areas, including Profs. Ron Ballinger, Linn Hobbs, Mujid Kazimi, Ju Li, Dennis Whyte, Bilge Yildiz, and Sid Yip. Three years ago we identified the field of extreme materials as a strategic opportunity for NSE, and I’m pleased to note the growing strength of our Department in this area. In fact, a team of NSE faculty led by Prof. Ju Li, in collaboration with the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and others, was recently selected in a spirited global competition, covering fields from space science and technology to IT and biomedical engineering, to work with Russia’s Skolkovo Institute of Technology to establish a new Center for Research, Education, and Innovation in the field of nuclear systems and materials.
Prof. Short is the sixth new faculty member to have joined NSE in the last three years. These new colleagues also include Prof. Li (nanomechanics), Prof. Kord Smith (reactor physics), Prof. Emilio Baglietto (computational fluid dynamics), and Prof. Scott Kemp (nuclear security).
Other young faculty colleagues include Prof. Ben Forget, whose important contributions to reactor physics research were recognized this summer when he won the American Nuclear Society’s Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award, given annually to an ANS member under the age of 40. Also this summer another young faculty colleague, Professor Paola Cappellaro (quantum engineering), was appointed Edgerton Associate Professor (named after the legendary MIT professor Doc Edgerton, whom many of you may remember.)
It is a remarkable fact that the NSE faculty is now, by a substantial margin, the youngest faculty of any department in MIT’s School of Engineering. The energy and enthusiasm of these outstanding young faculty are helping to revitalize the Department, and they remind us that nuclear science and engineering is still a very young field, with vast promise and exciting possibilities that we have barely begun to explore.
It will of course be our students who will lead these new developments. And I was pleased to see that two NSE doctoral students, Leslie Dewan and Jake DeWitte, were recently featured in a thoughtful Time magazine article (here) on the new wave of nuclear innovation and entrepreneurship. I have no doubt that other NSE students will soon be forging new nuclear pathways of their own.
Warm regards,
Richard
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