Dr. Daniel Suarez is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee, bringing an unusually broad background that spans nuclear power plant operations, computational fluid dynamics research, and academic instruction across three countries. He holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation from the Polytechnical University of Catalonia (UPC), where his dissertation — recognized with UPC’s Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award in 2025 — focused on heat transfer correlations for liquid metal flows under nuclear fusion conditions using computational fluid dynamics. Before transitioning to his current academic role, he spent over a decade as a nuclear power operations instructor engineer at Tecnatom in Spain, holding the highest-level instructor certification in the Spanish nuclear industry, and subsequently served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he developed simulation tools for liquid metal magnetohydrodynamic flows in plasma-facing components and breeding blankets.
Dr. Suarez’s research centers on liquid metal magnetohydrodynamics for fusion thermal-hydraulic systems, with published work appearing in journals including Nuclear Science and Engineering, Fusion Engineering and Design, and Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. He has been a two-time recipient of the People’s Choice Winner award at ORNL’s Annual Research Symposium and has presented his work at major international fusion conferences including SOFT, SOFE, and ISFNT. At Tennessee, he teaches a wide range of nuclear engineering courses spanning introductory nuclear engineering through reactor theory, numerical methods, and nuclear licensing, and he brings to the classroom firsthand experience from both industrial reactor operations and cutting-edge fusion energy research.