Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at Illinois congratulates faculty members J.P. Allain, Ling-Jian Meng, and Tomas Kozlowski, all of whom will be promoted to higher ranks starting August 16.
Allain and Meng, previously associate professors, will become full professors, and Kozlowski, previously an assistant professor, will become an associate professor with tenured status.
J.P. Allain
An NPRE alumnus, Allain joined the Department’s faculty in 2013 as an associate professor. He came to NPRE from Purdue University where he had been a faculty member at the School of Nuclear Engineering since 2007, following four years as a staff scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. At Illinois, Allain is an affiliate faculty with the Department of Bioengineering, the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
Allain is the author of over 170 papers, book chapters and proceedings in both experimental and computational modeling work in the area of particle-surface interactions. His research includes developing in-situ surface structure and composition evolution characterization of heterogeneous surfaces under low-energy irradiation promoting structure and function at the nanoscale.
He has received numerous honors, including the U.S. Department of Engineering Early Career 2010 Award, the Research Excellence Award in 2011, the Fulbright Award in 2015, the Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellow designation in 2016-2017, and the 2017 College of Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
Allain earned his master’s degree and PhD in NPRE in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from California State Polytechnic University in 1996.
Ling-Jian Meng
Meng joined the NPRE faculty as an assistant professor in 2006, following four years as an assistant research scientist and research fellow in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan. He also is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois and the Beckman Institute. He is a visiting associate professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School.
The emphasis of Meng’s research is to fundamentally advance the field of radiological sciences, especially to allow a more efficient use of ionizing radiation for healthcare applications. Over the past 10 years, Meng has been able to establish one of the most active research groups in the world in developing radiological imaging instrumentations. At Beckman, Meng recently established and is leading the Radio-Opto-Nano Working Group, which forms an interface between radiological sciences, optical techniques and nanomaterials. He also led in establishing inter-institutional collaborations, such as the partnership between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Massachusetts General Hospital for Research and Training in Molecular Imaging, to organize conferences and topical workshops promoting the next generation of radiological imaging approaches.
Meng earned a PhD in physics from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom in 2001, and a bachelor’s degree in modern physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1995.
Tomasz Kozlowski
Kozlowski came to NPRE as an assistant professor in 2011, following two years as an assistant professor at the Nuclear Power Safety division of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is a faculty affiliate of the Computational Science and Engineering Department at Illinois, was a visiting professor at the Warsaw Institute of Technology in Poland, and is an associate professor at the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Poland.
Kozlowski focuses his research on developing and validating advanced methods in deterministic safety analysis to accurately determine reactor safety margins and reactor behavior. His work supports nuclear reactor safety analysis, and increases the fidelity of primary system simulation.
Kozlowski investigates the capability and limitations of best-estimate coupled codes for reactor transient analysis, a complex problem involving the solution of thermal-hydraulics and neutron kinetics equations. While his initial focus was on coupled thermal-hydraulics and neutron-kinetic simulations of nuclear reactors and analysis of reactor transients and stability, the work has expanded to include fundamental mathematical, numerical and physical models problems in reactor simulation.
His honors include his selection as the 2015 winner of the American Nuclear Society Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award, recognizing outstanding achievement in which engineering knowledge has been effectively applied to yield an engineering concept, design, safety improvement, method of analysis or product utilized in nuclear power research and development or commercial application.
Kozlowski earned his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in nuclear engineering at Purdue University in 2000, 2004, and 2005, respectively.