gavin@ridleygav.in:~$ cat about.txt
About
I'm a nuclear engineer who likes the computational end of the field: neutron transport, reactor physics, and the numerical methods and hardware that make those calculations fast enough to design with.
My PhD work at MIT, with Benoit Forget, was about adapting continuous-energy Monte Carlo neutron transport to GPUs. The interesting part turned out not to be porting code but reformulating physics. Resonance upscatter sampling became a root-finding problem on a new special function, the incomplete Faddeeva function. Unresolved-resonance cross sections became a one-dimensional probability model with a normal inverse Gaussian distribution at its heart. Both run faster on a GPU than the methods they replaced and use far less memory.
Today I'm in Austin, Texas, designing the core of a new reactor at a stealth-mode startup. I'm also occasionally in the press as the person who will do the dose calculation when a startup says something optimistic about spent fuel.
timeline
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NOW · AUSTIN, TX
Reactor core design · stealth-mode nuclear startup
Neutronics and full-core simulation for a new reactor. Also built a Sieverts apparatus for benchtop hydride fabrication when the model needed data that didn't exist.
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2019 – 2024 · CAMBRIDGE, MA
PhD, Computational Nuclear Science and Engineering · MIT
Thesis: GPU-Oriented Algorithms for Continuous Energy Monte Carlo Neutron Transport. Developed a CUDA-based OpenMC and new Monte Carlo algorithms, ran the department's compute cluster, served as MIT ANS president. Summer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in XCP-3.
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2019
Independent contractor · C-Zero
OpenFOAM two-phase flow model of an experiment, calibrated against measurements and presented to Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
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2018 – 2019 · OAK RIDGE, TN
Applied Research Fellow · Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Coupled neutron and gamma heat deposition in a novel reactor design. Wrote an OpenFOAM solver for a phase-change-driven control rod.
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2014 – 2018 · KNOXVILLE, TN
BS, Nuclear Engineering, minor in Mathematics · University of Tennessee
Summa cum laude. Undergraduate research modifying Serpent 2 to accelerate molten salt reactor refueling calculations, and PDE-constrained optimization for multigroup diffusion. Summer 2017 at UIUC building Moltres, a MOOSE-based molten salt reactor code.