Huff, Stubbins to lead UIUC's work in new DOE consortium

2/15/2021 Phillip Kisubika

Written by Phillip Kisubika

Huff, Stubbins to lead UIUC's work in new DOE consortium

Professors James Stubbins and Katy Huff are part of a newly-announced consortium with the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA), which will connect UIUC students to nuclear nonproliferation work at multiple universities and national laboratories across the country.

The total budget for the consortium—which will be led by the University of California, Berkeley and includes 11 schools in total—is massive ($25 million over five years), and the Illinois sub-award should be $1.25M.

Prof. Stubbins will be a co-lead of the nuclear materials thrust area, while Prof. Huff will be a co-lead of the crosscutting computational thrust area.

Prof. Huff will be the UIUC point of contact for this collaboration and a Co-Lead in the Computation and Optimization for Nuclear Applications. She will guide efforts and deliverables regarding machine learning method development and quality assurance on the crosscutting Computation, Optimization and Nuclear Applications thrust area. This will include contribution to quarterly and milestone reports for the thrust area. She will be responsible individually for guiding supported graduate researchers at UIUC in tasks related to algorithm development, geometry generation, neutronic analysis, and verification and validation.

In that thrust area, she will collaborate with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, among others. Direct computational and algorithmic development will contribute to subtasks, publications, and presentations in the context of this thrust area.

Prof. Stubbins will similarly serve as the Co-Lead in the Nuclear Materials area. He will guide efforts and deliverables in the Nuclear Materials thrust area. This will include contribution to quarterly and milestone reports for the thrust area. He will be responsible individually for guiding supported graduate researchers at UIUC in tasks related to nuclear materials analysis, modeling, testing, and experiments. In collaboration with graduate students, undergraduate students, and national laboratory collaborators, he will produce publications, reports, presentations in the context of the many subtasks in the Nuclear Materials thrust area.

Travel, publication, and engagement with the DOE national laboratories will be part of the activities undertaken by faculty and graduate students at UIUC, but overall project management will remain the primary responsibility of the PI (Dr. Jasmina Vujic) at UC Berkeley. 

For more on this consortium, read here.


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This story was published February 15, 2021.