NPRE moves up in US nuclear engineering program rankings

The graduate engineering program of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at Illinois has moved up a spot in the U.S. News and World Report rankings of Best Graduate Schools in the United States.

NPRE has moved from number 10 to number 9 for 2017. Peer assessments are among the criteria used to determine the rankings.

“We are pleased with the recognition our talented new faculty members are attracting from other nuclear engineering programs,” said NPRE Department Head Jim Stubbins.

With the hiring of seven new assistant and associate professors, the number of NPRE faculty has almost doubled since 2011.  The new faculty members have provided new expertise in nuclear reactor simulations and systems, nuclear materials, probabilistic risk analysis, and radiation detection and homeland security, and have significantly strengthened the department’s plasma/fusion focus.

The department will gain another assistant professor in January, with the addition of Katy Huff, currently a Nuclear Science and Security Consortium postdoctoral scholar in the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California–Berkeley. Huff’s research includes computational nuclear fuel cycle analysis and computational simulation of coupled, transient, nuclear reactor physics.

Another major accomplishment for NPRE has been the acquisition of HIDRA (Hybrid Illinois Device for Research and Applications), a one-of-a-kind plasma/fusion advanced physics testing facility that combines the operations of a tokamak and a stellarator. The facility was a gift from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, which replaced the device with the construction of the world’s biggest stellarator, Wendelstein 7-X, (W7-X) a plasma device for controlled nuclear fusion reaction.

NPRE will celebrate the first plasma of the HIDRA facility at 4 p.m., Friday, April 22, as part of an Open House of many of the department’s laboratories.