Dr. Adrien Couet is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also holds a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering and serves as Director of the UW Ion Beam Laboratory, a partner facility of the Nuclear Science User Facilities network. He earned his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 2014, building on dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Engineering Physics from Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France, and spent a year as a research engineer at Electricité de France R&D in Paris before joining UW-Madison as a faculty member in 2015. His research focuses on nuclear materials behavior in extreme environments, with particular emphasis on high-temperature and molten salt corrosion, radiation effects, plasma-facing materials for fusion applications, and the redox chemistry of advanced reactor systems. He is also a leader in applying high-throughput experimentation and machine learning to accelerate the discovery of corrosion-resistant structural materials.
Dr. Couet has been recognized as a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow, received the Vilas Faculty Early-Career Investigator Award and the Grainger Associate Professorship at UW-Madison, and was shortlisted for the Journal of Nuclear Materials Rising Star Award. His work has appeared in high-profile journals including Nature Communications, Science Advances, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Acta Materialia, and spans topics from in situ molten salt corrosion monitoring to irradiation-corrosion synergies in zirconium alloys and high-entropy alloys. He also serves as Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the NEEP department and as Technical Lead for the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp through the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, reflecting a commitment to both departmental leadership and the broader nuclear energy ecosystem.