Presenters

Dr. Abdalla Abou-Jaoude, is an R&D staff scientist in the Advanced Reactor Technology Department of Idaho National Laboratory (INL). He is the work-package manager for the Virtual Test Bed (VTB), a National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC)-funded initiative supporting the deployment of advanced reactors through multiphysics modeling and simulations capabilities. Dr. Abou-Jaoude also leading a multimillion-dollar project to demonstrate molten-salt irradiation capability at INL. He has extensive experience in advanced reactor design, most notably for molten-salt reactors, sodium fast reactors, nuclear thermal propulsion, and heat-pipe-based microreactors. He is also heavily involved in nuclear economics and nonproliferation. Abdalla is leading the development of an economics-by-design framework to assess the cost of advanced reactors, specifically microreactors, as part of the Department of Energy Systems Analysis & Integration (SA&I) campaign. He previously supported a private-public partnership with a U.S. utility to evaluate hydrogen-cogeneration options at nuclear power plants. In 2017, he graduated with a PhD in nuclear engineering from Georgia Tech and was the INL Deboisblanc Distinguished Postdoctoral Associate during 2018. He obtained a MEng in mechanical with nuclear engineering from Imperial College London in 2013.

Dr. Derek Gaston is a deputy national technical director for the U.S. DOE Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program, and a staff scientist within the Computational Frameworks department at INL. He received his PhD in computational nuclear engineering from MIT in 2019 and his MS in computational applied mathematics from the University of Texas in Austin in 2006. Dr. Gaston is the original developer of the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) computational science framework. With MOOSE, he has worked in many scientific areas including nuclear reactor simulation, geophysics, microstructure analysis, and fluid flow. He has received multiple Laboratory Director awards at INL, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering in 2011 and, in 2014, his team received an R&D 100 award from R&D magazine.

Dr. April Novak is the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Fellow in the Computational Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). She has extensive experience in multiphysics modeling and simulation, computational thermal-hydraulics, and multiscale methods. April is the lead developer of the Cardinal MOOSE application, which couples the NekRS Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and OpenMC Monte Carlo codes to the MOOSE framework. As part of her PhD research, April developed multiscale methods for pebble bed analysis within the coarse-mesh thermal-fluid Pronghorn MOOSE application. She now leads several projects in the high-resolution multiphysics space with applications to fast reactor core radial expansion and gas microreactors, and supports a broad range of industry collaborations. She has a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (2020).

Dr. Guillaume Giudicelli is a computational scientist at INL. He maintains and develops reactor physics computational tools for the MOOSE framework. These tools are supporting an increasing number of both industrial and institutional partners for INL. Before joining the laboratory, Dr. Giudicelli obtained his PhD on equivalence methods for high-fidelity neutron transport simulations at MIT.