Postdoctoral Researchers

Harry focuses on novel nuclear power conversion systems design and performance estimation along with their economic performance.

The primary system designed is the Nuclear Air-Brayton Combined Cycle (NACC), with secondary focus on supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) cycles.

Harry received his Ph.D. (2015) in Nuclear Engineering with a designated emphasis in energy science and technology and holds a B.S. (2011) in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia.

Harry has interned at the at Nuclear Power Engineering Section of the International Atomic Energy Agency (2013).  Harry has also interned at Omega Industries in Vancouver, WA, designing and producing uni-body railroad crossings and train jack panels, adhering to AREMA and ACI code standards.

In his spare time, Harry enjoys traveling and reading about foreign affairs, policy, and history.  He also is very fond of cars, in particular European classics.

katyhuff@github.io

Katy Huff focuses on coupled neutronics and thermal hydraulics modeling for transients in the PB-FHR. For this analysis, Katy has developed PyRK, a point reactor kinetics and 1-d heat transfer python package for accident transient analysis. Additionally, she is developing a MOOSE-based application for 3-D fully coupled simulation of these scenarios.

Katy received her Ph.D. (2013) in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and holds a bachelor’s degree (2008) in Physics from the University of Chicago. She has participated in varied research including experimental cosmological astrophysics, experimental nonequilibrium granular material phase dynamics, computational nuclear fuel cycle analysis, and now, with the FHR, multi-scale multi-physics accident transient analysis.

Katy has a joint appointment with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium as well as the FHR project. Among other professional service, she is the Vice Chair of the ANS Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division and the Chair of the Steering Committee of the Software Carpentry Foundation, an international nonprofit dedicated to scientific computing education. She has also served as the Program Chair (2013 & 2014) and Proceedings Chair (2015) of the SciPy Conference. She is a founder of The Hacker Within scientific computing group as well as the Nuclear Pride LGBTQ+ organization.

http://katyhuff.github.io/papers/cv.pdf

Mike Laufer focuses on granular flow physics in pebble bed reactor cores, including both experimental and simulation efforts to better understand these systems.  Mike led the effort to design and build the X-Ray Pebble Recirculation Experiment (X-PREX), which provides high fidelity data on pebble flow to validate discrete element method simulations.  Mike also works on technology development strategies for the the design and licensing of advanced reactors, with a particular focus on the PB-FHR.

Mike received his Ph.D. (2013) in Nuclear Engineering from UC Berkeley where his earlier work focused on the development of a simplified discrete element code for design efforts and scaled experiments to study the coupled fluid and pebble dynamics in the PB-FHR core.  He previously received his B.S. (2006) in Mechanical Engineering with Honors in International Security Studies from Stanford University.

Mike has held internship positions at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ducati Motorcycles.

In his free time, Mike enjoys skiing, hiking, traveling, photography, and playing with his one-year old daughter.