Hosted by the College of Engineering, Office of Research, School of Nuclear Engineering

Abstract

Purdue University and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have a long history of collaborations that date back to the Manhattan Project. LANL’s Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation, Computing and Theory Mark B. Chadwick will cover this historical collaboration in nuclear fusion research and the impacts on today’s journey toward nuclear fusion sources of energy. Mark will further highlight current LANL key activities and the importance of university partnerships.

Biography

Mark Chadwick is the Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation, Computing and Theory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He oversees three divisions for Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI), High Performance Computing (HPC), and Theoretical (T) to advance the frontiers of modeling, simulation and computation essential to LANL's science and security missions.

Prior to his current assignment, he served as the interim deputy director for science, technology & engineering at LANL and was the chief scientist and chief operating officer for the associate laboratory director for weapons physics.

Chadwick's research work is in applied nuclear physics, and he has been leading cross- laboratory scientific research strategy and integration in the nuclear arena. He also leads the national U.S. collaboration that oversees the development of evaluated neutron data files (ENDF, evaluation committee) cross sections that are widely used in neutronics transport simulations.

Chadwick has more than 345 publications, of which 150 are refereed journal papers, and more than 18,800 citations. Chadwick is the lead author on a number of physics books published by the American Nuclear Society. These books include collections of technical history papers on fission and the Manhattan Project, as well as fusion. Chadwick also wrote an International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements book, defining standards for energy deposition in neutron and proton radiation cancer therapy, and a book with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on photonuclear data for nonproliferation and radiation protection applications.

Chadwick came to Los Alamos as a directors postdoctoral fellow in 1990. Since then, he has held many leadership and technical roles in the weapons program, including program director for science campaigns, XCP division leader and theoretical division group leader, and deputy division leader focused on solving technical challenges underpinning the stewardship of the U.S. nuclear weapon stockpile.

In 2011, Chadwick was awarded the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award for his analysis of fission product yields and their energy dependencies that resolve a long-standing discrepancy in nuclear yield assessments. He is a Los Alamos fellow, as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society. He earned a bachelor's and PhD in physics from Oxford University in the United Kingdom.