Katy Huff wins College of Engineering Pierce Faculty Award

In recognition of her dedication in working with NPRE students, Assistant Prof. Kathryn D. Huff has been chosen as the 2019 winner of the Illinois College of Engineering Stanley H. Pierce Award.

Selected by the student-run Engineering Council, the annual Pierce Awards recognize one undergraduate student and one faculty member college-wide for their efforts to develop empathetic student-faculty cooperation.

“Professor Huff has exhibited a type of genuine interest and caring for the well-being of every student in the NPRE department,” said one student in nominating Huff, who was pleased and humbled by the honor. “Indeed, it’s definitely very gratifying that it came from the students,” Huff said.

A Blue Waters Assistant Professor for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Huff directs the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group in NPRE. Her work with students, particularly as an advisor to the Illinois student section of the American Nuclear Society, has extended far beyond the classroom and her own research program.

Huff often attends ANS meetings, has worked with the group on events such as National Nuclear Science Week held each fall, and travels with the students to the annual ANS Student Conferences, through which the Illinois group has won several awards over the past few years.

Huff earned a bachelor of arts degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 2008 and a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. She gained research experience at a number of laboratories, including Los Alamos Neutron Science Center in New Mexico, Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics in Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California-Berkeley Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and a Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science prior to joining the NPRE faculty in 2016.

Since coming to Illinois, Huff has earned the ANS Young Member Excellence Award in 2016 and the ANS Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement Award in 2017. She was also the 2017 recipient of the Students Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from her home department and has been listed among the University of Illinois Teachers Ranked as Excellent.

Huff has chaired the ANS Fuel Cycle & Waste Management Division and the Software Carpentry Foundation’s Steering Committee.

“Professor Huff not only strives to be an exceptional teacher, but also a dedicated undergraduate advisor, a distinguished research director, and a greatly supportive faculty advisor for the American Nuclear Society,” wrote another student. “She makes it clear that she cares about the success of her students just as much as she cares about the success of her research.”