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. 

Register for event with Commissioner David Wright, March 31

Join the UT Nuclear Niche for an in-person fireside chat with Commissioner David Wright of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Use the QR code below or this link to register. 

📍 Rowling 5.210
🗓 Tuesday, March 31, 2026
⏰ 1:30–3:00 PM

🍭 Light bites provided

New Publication on the economic viability of nuclear power in Texas

Current PhD student Ivy Seidel published the peer-reviewed paper, Investigating nuclear energy viability in Texas with decision making model GenX, in the journal Energy Economics. This paper focuses on the analysis of the economic viability of Nuclear Power in Texas. Seidel utilized open source capacity expansion model GenX to weigh the cost of unserved energy against the cost of implementing nuclear power in the face of electricity demand growth Texas. ERCOT is expected to experience a dramatic increase in the number of data centers being constructed due to the favorable economic landscape of the state, this would greatly impact industrial power draw and need to be accounted for in the coming years. A sharp rise in power demand along with expected population growth is predicted to cause a near doubling of the average electricity demand in Texas by 2030.