Kathryn D. Huff
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) named Kathryn D. Huff (PhDNEEP ’13) principal deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy in May 2021.
Huff was most recently an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group and was a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Before her faculty appointment, she was a postdoctoral fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California-Berkeley.
Huff received her PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2013 as a student of Engineering Physics Professor Paul P.H. Wilson, and earned a BA in physics from the University of Chicago in 2008. Her research includes modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles. She has been an active member of the American Nuclear Society, chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division, a past chair of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and a recipient of both the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement awards. Through leadership within Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Hacker Within, and the Journal of Open Source Software, she has also advocated for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing.