Our People

Principal Investigator

Lefteri Tsoukalas
Professor Nuclear Engineering
Dr. Lefteri Tsoukalas is recipient of the Humboldt Prize and an internationally renowned expert in signal processing algorithms applied to nuclear materials detection and non-proliferation, smart sensor development and advanced measurement techniques. He has extensive experience as a safeguards engineer and as a nuclear instrumentation and controls specialist and has served in several advisory and consulting positions for national and international regulatory agencies. He has more than 25 years of accumulated experience as project manager of competitively funded projects sponsored, among others, by NNSA, NRC, DOD, DOE and EPRI. His research covers both experimental and model development studies, signal processing techniques, including cutting edge multi-variant statistical methods, Gaussian processes for background estimation, wavelet analysis and Hilbert-Huang transforms.

Graduate Students

Rita Appiah
Graduate Research Assistant
Rita Appiah is a graduate teaching assistant and a PhD student in Nuclear Engineering with an interdisciplinary background in computational science and engineering. She is an award recipient of the CIGP Lynn graduate fellowship at Purdue University. Her research interests include Artificial intelligence for control and optimization of energy systems, Multiphysics modelling and simulations, wireless sensor networks localization algorithms for nuclear material detection, nuclear safeguards instrumentation and verification.
Ugur Cotul
Graduate Research Assistant
Ugur is a Ph.D. student at Purdue Nuclear Engineering department. He got his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Cumhuriyet University in Turkey (2012) and MS in Material Science Engineering from the Bursa Technical University in Turkey (2017). He received a North America Best Presentation Award during the 28th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE28). His research interests include passive system analysis for nuclear reactors.
Maria Pantopoulou
Graduate Research Assistant
Maria Pantopoulou is a graduate student in the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. She holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, a MS in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University and she is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering. She is also a visiting scholar at Argonne National Laboratory and her current research is focused on machine learning applications and safe communications for advanced reactors.
Stella Pantopoulou
Graduate Research Assistant
Stella holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece (2018) and a MS in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University (2021). She is currently pursuing a PhD in Nuclear Engineering while also being a visiting student in Argonne National Laboratory. She is the recipient of the ANS Robert E. Uhrig Graduate Scholarship for 2022-2023. Her research interests include cybersecurity and machine learning methods for advanced reactors.
Konstantinos Prantikos
Graduate Research Assistant
Konstantinos Prantikos is a research graduate student in the AISL. He has received his MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Thessaly in Greece (2019) and a MS in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University (2022). He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. He is also a visiting graduate student with Nuclear Science and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory. In addition, he is the recipient of Gerondelis Foundation Graduate Study Scholarship (2022). His research interests include AI systems and machine learning for advanced reactors.

Undergraduate Students

Sofia is a Physics undergraduate student at the National University of Colombia. She is a visiting student at the AISL. Her research interests are quantum computing, cryptography, and quantum sensing. Her research focuses on safe communication using quantum encryption protocols.