Radiation Detection Expert is NPRE's First Female Faculty Member

5/30/2012 Susan Mumm

Written by Susan Mumm

Radiation Detection Expert is NPRE's First Female Faculty Member

NPRE welcomes Assistant Prof. Clair J. Sullivan, the department’s first-ever female faculty member.

Having most recently worked for the federal government, Sullivan will bring to NPRE expertise on radiation detection and measurements. She has nearly a decade of experience as both a researcher and practitioner applying her background to the fields of nuclear emergency response, intelligence, and homeland security.

Sullivan will begin in NPRE this fall. In her position at the federal government, where she has been responsible managing a scientific advisory group, a multi-million dollar research portfolio, and a new laboratory facility among other duties, “I don’t get to spend as much time as I would like to doing real research. I want to get back to working with students again, and producing work that I can publish.”

She hopes to develop improved algorithms for detector devices as part of her research.

Clair Sullivan with NPRE student Richard Kustra
Clair Sullivan with NPRE student Richard Kustra

 

Before working for the federal government, Sullivan worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she was a member of on-call deployable nuclear emergency response teams that used radiation detectors in the field for homeland security and emergency response situations. The detectors would indicate a suspicious material’s presence, but were often inaccurate in identifying the source. “Was it plutonium or something benign?” Sullivan said the team would wonder. “A lot of detectors were getting very wrong answers. We were spending thousands of dollars on equipment that was kind of worthless.”

She believes the work she’s doing with algorithms shows promise. “I want to take that to the next level.”

Sullivan will establish a small lab in NPRE for her research work, and this fall will teach NPRE 451 (radiation detection and instrumentation; radiation dosimetry and shielding; basic measurements in nuclear engineering; engineering applications; micro computer data acquisition and experimental control). She looks forward to her career’s new direction.

“What drew me to Illinois is how collaborative the atmosphere is. There are 60 multidisciplinary centers; I’m impressed by how much people are encouraged to collaborate with each other,” she said.

Among the researchers with whom Sullivan could potentially work is Assistant Prof. Ling Jian Meng, an NPRE faculty member since 2006. Meng, who also studies radiation detection and measurement as well as biomedical imaging, knew Sullivan previously when he was an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan and she was a student there.

“He and I shared a lab together back at Michigan,” Sullivan said of Meng.

Having grown up near Detroit, Sullivan earned four degrees from the University of Michigan: bachelor’s degrees in astronomy and physics in 1997, a master’s in nuclear engineering in 1998, and a PhD in nuclear engineering in 2002. She was named the “Graduate Student of the Year” at the time she earned her doctorate.

She also received the 2004 Distinguished Performance Award from Los Alamos. The Los Alamos honor recognized Sullivan’s work with the Port Authority New York/New Jersey Police to secure New York City from nuclear terrorism.

In addition to this honor, Sullivan shares ownership of three patents:

  • One on a semiconductor neutron detector (2011)
  • Another on a method and system for high-speed, 3D imaging of optically-invisible radiation (2004)
  • And the third on an augmented reality radiation display system and in situ spectrometry method for determining the depth distribution of radionuclides (1999).

She also served as a professional service associate editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Nuclear Science journal.


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This story was published May 30, 2012.