Syed Bahauddin Alam, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, has been named the 2026 recipient of The American Nuclear Society Ted Quinn Early Career Award. The award reflects Alam’s groundbreaking contributions to AI-enabled virtual sensing, real-time digital twins, and regulatory-aligned intelligent monitoring for instrumentation and control.
Established in 2017, the Ted Quinn Early Career Award honors one individual annually for outstanding early-career contributions to nuclear instrumentation and control or human-machine interface technologies. Named after Ted Quinn, former ANS President of Technology Resources, the accolade highlights the importance of young (ANS) members in the future developments of nuclear instrumentation and controls and human factors research, development and deployment.
Alam's research develops model-based state inference, agentic foundation models, and deployable hardware platforms to improve the efficiency, reliability, autonomy, and safety of nuclear energy systems. His work infers hard-to-measure reactor states from limited instrumentation by combining large-scale pretrained models with physics-aware machine learning. Since joining Illinois in 2023, Alam has built a nationally visible research program at the intersection of nuclear engineering, artificial intelligence, scientific machine learning, cybersecurity, and high-performance computing. His work has also contributed to national conversations on artificial intelligence for science and nuclear energy.
“With his groundbreaking work on AI-driven digital twins, explainable artificial intelligence, and advanced modeling for nuclear energy systems, Professor Alam is highly deserving of this award,” said Rizwan Uddin, head of the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering. “We are glad to see him recognized for his exceptional contributions to the future of nuclear engineering and scientific innovation.”
Alam reflected on the award’s significance, expressing gratitude for his Illinois Grainger colleagues.
“Illinois has made a huge difference in my career,” Alam said. “I am deeply grateful to Professor Uddin, who has been a role model and a constant source of inspiration. He connected me with the right collaborators and consistently opened doors to new opportunities. My NPRE colleagues have likewise been instrumental in shaping my research, and I feel very fortunate to be part of this community. I am also sincerely grateful to Ted Quinn, ANS President H.M. Hashemian, and Dr. Vivek Agarwal of Idaho National Laboratory for supporting my nomination and this recognition.”
Alam was formally presented with the award on May 31 at the 2026 ANS Annual Conference in Denver.
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Syed Bahauddin Alam is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering. He is affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.