UT Student win Best Paper in Operations and Power at the ANS Student Conference

Jeongwon Seo and Sam Queralt won "Best Paper in Operations and Power" for their writing and presentation of "Efficiency Enhancement of Control Rod Worth Calibration in TRIGA Mk-II Reactor using Rod Swap Technique" at the ANS Student Conference in April. While current control rod calibration methods struggle to balance accuracy with efficiency, Rod Swap enables improvements in both. These new findings could be implemented at the university's own TRIGA reactor on the J. J. Pickle Research Campus. Until they are, this paper offers a new perspective on control rod worth calibration and invites further research in to improving the baseline operations of nuclear reactors.

More information can be found about control rod worth here: https://nuclear-twins.tacc.utexas.edu/rod_calibration

Director of Strategic Nuclear Programs Represents UT at ReCENT's PowerUp Summit

Dani Zigon, Director of Strategic Initiatives for UT Austin's Nuclear and Radiation Engineering Program, delivered the opening keynote at Texas A&M's 2026 ReCENT Summit on April 28–29. The PowerUp program event brought approximately 500 middle and high school students to campus over two days for hands-on exposure to careers in clean energy and nuclear technology.

New NIH Trailblazer Award to Advance Robot-Assisted Imaging in Nuclear Medicine

The Translational Radiological Advanced Imaging Laboratory (TRAIL) in the Nuclear and Radiation Engineering Program within the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering has been awarded a R21 Trailblazer Award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will support the development of a novel, robot-assisted SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) imaging system, a project that seeks to redefine how high-resolution functional images of the human body are acquired.

Rethinking Nuclear Criticality Validation: Dr. Jeongwon Seo's Score Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Benchmark Selection

Dr. Jeongwon Seo’s latest paper, "Validation performance assessment through quantitative score focused on benchmark selection for nuclear criticality safety," has been published in Nuclear Science and Technology Open Research. While traditional validation relies on heuristic similarity rules, Dr. Seo introduces a "Score" concept that normalizes prediction residuals by their associated uncertainty. This provides an uncertainty-aware lens to ensure that model predictions are statistically consistent rather than just numerically close.

NRE Student, Braden Pecora, awarded inaugural KBH Computation Energy Fellowship

Nuclear and Radiation Engineering graduate student Braden Pecora has been selected as the 2026–27 Kay Bailey Hutchison (KBH) Computational Energy Fellow, a joint fellowship from the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the KBH Energy Center at UT Austin.

The fellowship recognizes an outstanding Oden Institute graduate student or postdoctoral fellow who contributes computational science expertise to the educational programming of the KBH Energy Center's Energy Studies Minor.