NPRE congratulates Prof. JP Allain, chosen as the inaugural head of the recently established Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering at Pennsylvania State University.
An NPRE faculty member since 2013, Allain, also an NPRE alumnus, began his new position on July 1. He holds the Lloyd and Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Plasma Medicine in the Huck Institutes for Life Sciences, as well as the positions of an Institute for Cyber Science faculty co-hire and professor of biomedical engineering by courtesy.
Allain’s ascension as a leader in nuclear engineering academics follows a tradition of NPRE alumni contributions in that arena. He joins NPRE Department Head Rizwan Uddin and Steven Biegalski, Chair of the Georgia Tech Nuclear and Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Program, as NPRE alumni heading top 10 U.S. nuclear engineering programs.
Allain served as Associate Head for Graduate Programs in NPRE, and established the Radiation Surface Science and Engineering Laboratory. He conducted research in fusion materials; materials science; plasma edge and plasma-material interaction (PMI) modeling; plasma nanosynthesis; plasma physics and fusion; plasma sources and processing; PMI diagnostics; and soft and biological materials.
“During his relatively brief stay at Illinois, JP built an impressive research program characterized by collaborations within NPRE and with colleagues across campus,” Uddin said of his colleague.
At Penn State, Allain, who earned NPRE master’s and PhD degrees in 2000 and 2001, respectively, will be working in the engineering college headed by Justin Schwartz, the Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering. Schwartz, another NPRE alumnus, earned his bachelor’s degree in the department in 1985.