Dr. Madicken Munk is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Oregon State University. Her research lies at the intersection of reactor physics, radiation transport, and scientific computing. Her projects have supported work in computational methods for radiation transport, hybrid methods for neutral particle simulation, Monte Carlo methods, reactor physics, reactor physics, data visualization, energy policy, fuel cycle modeling and analysis, scientific computing, and open science. She and her students have contributed to and developed software tools supporting reactor analysis, including OpenMC, Moltres, MCDC, Osier, and Cyclus. Prior to joining Oregon State University, she was a research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering; and was a postdoctoral research associate in the Data Exploration Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC. She earned her PhD and MS from the University of California, Berkeley and her BS from Oregon State University, all in Nuclear Engineering.
Dr. Munk has led or contributed to research supported by the US Department of Energy, The US National Nuclear Security Administration, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Dr. Munk serves as a leader in the nuclear engineering and scientific computing communities. She is a member of the leadership team for the Scientific Python project, a shared governance and vision project to align python tooling in the sciences. She currently serves as the general chair for the SciPy conference for a term from 2025-2028, she has served on the Carpentries Curriculum Advisory Committee and the yt-project executive committee. She has served as Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer of the Mathematics and Computation division of the American Nuclear Society. She is currently the Education Crosscut Co-Lead on the Center for Advancing the Radiation Resilience of Electronics, an DOE-NNSA PSAAP predictive simulation center. Dr. Munk has a record of developing, maintaining, and leading in open source scientific software communities and in developing software to support advanced reactor design. Dr. Munk provides expertise in open source software development and community management, radiation transport, reactor physics, scientific computing, and data visualization.