Spotlight on Argonne National Laboratory
The ANS Young Members Group (YMG) is offering a series of live webinars—Spotlight on National Labs—to highlight the missions, key projects, and rising stars of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. Recently it was Argonne National Laboratory’s turn to shine.
What you’ll see: Watch the April 30 webinar to learn about Argonne’s storied history as a nuclear engineering, chemistry, and materials laboratory and how the lab is supporting key DOE nuclear energy initiatives today, including the development and demonstration of fast reactor and fuel recycle technologies.
Temitope Taiwo, ANS Fellow and interim director of Argonne’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Division, kicked off the presentations with an overview of the lab and its nuclear research capabilities. Seven Argonne engineers then spoke about projects they are involved in, including reactor safety experiments, advanced nuclear materials, the Versatile Test Reactor, molten salt chemistry and pyroprocessing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, microreactor design and analysis, and research and test reactor conversion.
Kasam-Griffith
Stauff
YMG puts it all together: Members of the YMG are sharing the work of organizing and moderating the Spotlight on National Labs series, and two ANL nuclear engineers—Nicolas Stauff and Alisha Kasam-Griffith—planned this latest installment.
“The ANS Spotlight on National Labs webinar series is a great opportunity to showcase the diversity of exciting nuclear research we are working on and a very good venue to continue to attract interns and researchers,” said Stauff, a member of the YMG Executive Committee who organized the panel and spoke about his own work with microreactors. “I learned a lot in this process by interacting with ANS staff on webinar organization and with the different project leads within my organization.”
Desai
“The panel highlighted the diversity of expertise at Argonne,” said YMG Chair Harsh Desai, who is playing a key role in the Spotlight on National Labs webinar series. Desai added that established and emerging leaders voiced a common message about Argonne’s collaboration with other national laboratories, companies, and universities.
Kasam-Griffith moderated the webinar presentations and the question-and-answer session that followed. “By launching this webinar series, YMG has given us a great opportunity to share Argonne's cutting-edge nuclear research with the wider community and to hopefully pique the interest of young scientists and engineers,” she said. “Our panelists showed that the advancement of safe and sustainable nuclear technology relies on researchers from a variety of areas. Events like this webinar are so important to keep us connected with others both within and beyond our field.”
Coming up next:The YMG plans to put the spotlight on one lab every two to three weeks for the next several months. Registration is open now for a May 6 webinar on Los Alamos National Laboratory.
You’ll find ANS’s growing library of informative webinars archived and accessible to ANS members as Webinars on Demand. Upcoming ANS webinars are listed at www.ans.org/webinars.
