Just over three years ago, Katy Huff was an assistant professor at NPRE, teaching, researching, and working on the early stages of the university’s micro-reactor project. Then Washington came calling, and she was tapped to join the Department of Energy and lead its Office of Nuclear Energy. After three years of public service, where she helped shape national energy policy, she’s back at Illinois, ready to take on life in academia again. Below is an edited conversation with the associate professor on her time in D.C. and what she missed during her time away.
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How does it feel to be back?
It’s great. I love being a professor. I love being on campus. The important work of being with students and doing research is what really makes me happy. Of course, the work at the DOE was also important in its own way, but it was time for me to come back. I really missed it here.
How often would you think about things (at Illinois) when you were (in Washington, D.C.)?
Every day. Every day, I thought about the difference between my former life and my life as the Assistant Secretary. Every day, there were important lessons that I’d learned from being a professor that I was able to bring into my job at DOE, like frugality, for example. A lot of folks who come from industry and national labs don’t have the kind of perspective on how far a dollar can go in the public sphere that faculty do. That perspective—how to be more frugal and more careful with a dollar, especially a public dollar—really served me a lot. I routinely thought about the billions of dollars that we were proposing to spend, and my default was to compare that to the cost of a graduate student over the course of a year. How many graduate student stipends could these billions of dollars support instead? So, it was very easy for me to make judgments about the value of a decision and reach decisions based on what the right path for an American taxpayer dollar was going to be.
Does campus feel different to you? Do you feel like you’ve come back to the same place?
There’s a great Nelson Mandela quote (“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”). I’ve been thinking about that sort of theme a lot because Illinois fundamentally is still the strong engineering institution that it was three years ago when I left it…I’ve changed a great deal, and certainly Illinois has gotten new buildings and new people and it has a nice sheen of newness…Returning to the familiarity of the University has given me a little bit of a mirror to reflect on the ways in which I myself am a bit different than I was three years ago.
Is it weird to have almost an entire senior class go through that hasn’t taken a class with you?
Oh, it’s so disappointing to have missed a whole class of students, because every class is a group of students that have a diversity of ideas, and they shape the students that come after them. It’s disappointing to have missed a year or two of those cohorts, and this (Class of 2024) will not have had any classes with me. That’s a shame because I love meeting and getting to know all the students that make it through our program. Hopefully, some of them interacted with me at student conferences and whatnot.
Obviously, there was a distance you had to keep from the university and everyone here while at DOE (to prevent conflict of interest). Did it hurt to not be able to be as closely involved with your Illinois students while you were on leave?
I was lucky that the university set up the system it did so I could walk away from my grants and students and whatnot to maintain that prevention of conflict of interest. I’m so grateful for the department supporting Madicken Munk to run the research group, but it was really hard to be away from my students. And it's even harder now, looking over how much their dissertation work has progressed and trying to catch up to them. There's a lot of co-learning that happens in the graduate student mentorship activity that I missed out on. I have to catch back up to some of them that are still around and dust off the cobwebs in my brain!
Was there ever a point when you considered not coming back to Illinois?
Never. I had many opportunities, especially as I was leaving DOE, that were certainly worth considering. From the beginning, from day one, I wanted to return to Illinois. Not only did I owe it to the university, but I also really love being here. It's a fantastic institution. Being a professor is the best job in the world, and frankly, I owed it to the students, especially the ones that I orphaned the first time.
Do you feel that you made a difference in your time at the DOE? I realize it may be too soon to know or do you already have a sense of it?
There are some things that definitely have already had an impact, especially in the university program. By coming in with more of an academic perspective than any of the previous assistant secretaries, I was able to make substantive changes to the university program in (nuclear energy) that will improve it and have already improved it, including the instantiation of the Distinguished Early Career program. We already have a recipient here at Illinois in Assistant Professor April Novak. And a handful of recipients around the country that are exactly the kind of early career faculty that didn't have an opportunity for a kind of career award in the existing Office of Science/NSF structure. Having an opportunity in the Office of Nuclear Energy is so important for those early career faculty, and I’m gratified to have helped create it.
I have also had an impact with regard to uranium and uranium supply, including investment in domestic supply chain and the ban on Russian uranium. We developed a uranium strategy that is now in motion to support the expansion of enrichment and conversion in the U.S., but time will tell whether it's sufficient to displace dependence on Russian uranium.
I think also about the way that the Office of Nuclear Energy functions. During my time there, you know well, I'm sure I had an impact. The office certainly had an impact. All of its staff, contributors and its general mission, I think, continued to advance while I was there, which has a great impact on the world. But, that's not entirely due to me. Obviously, it's entirely due to the broader staff there at the office.
Did you have any starstruck moments?
Absolutely. I met Presidents, I met (Ukrainian) President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy before the war started. I met and actually talked to at some length to President (Emmanuel) Macron of France. I’ve met the president of Ghana (Nana Akufo-Addo). Those sorts of interactions are just incredibly moving. I obviously will never forget any of those. I've met our own President, President Biden. I was certainly starstruck, but we had real work to do in all of those cases, and having work to do with at that level with people like that really puts into perspective the impact you can make and how important nuclear energy is to nations all across the world.
Are you looking forward to not having to look at things at a macro level and being one of the faculty here again?
Absolutely. I think the nice thing about having experienced that perspective at the macro scale is that now I think I have an even better understanding of what kind of impacts I can make with innovations at the micro scale on those bigger, macro scale problems. I think the relevance of my research will be clearer to me as I move forward, and I'll be able to pursue even more relevant lines of inquiry at the micro scale.
So, what are your ambitions now that you're back working with students and you prepare to do it fully again in the fall?
Well, I have some good research ideas. I'll be putting in some clever proposals across the space of proposal opportunities, and I look forward to getting my existing graduate students across the finish line. That’s going to be a main focus, and I'll be dusting off my brain as I teach reactor kinetics, checking whether or not it's like riding a bike. I'm pretty sure the cobwebs are clearing.