gavin@ridleygav.in:~$ whoami
Gavin Ridley
computational nuclear engineer
I design reactor cores at a stealth-mode nuclear startup in Austin, Texas. Before that I did a PhD at MIT on making continuous-energy Monte Carlo neutron transport run well on GPUs, which mostly meant finding new ways to write down old physics so the math fits the hardware.
now
Core design for a new reactor: neutronics, full-core simulation, etc. Details are under wraps for now.
selected work
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PhD · MIT · 2024
GPU Monte Carlo neutron transport
Built a CUDA version of OpenMC, then went after the pieces of the physics that fight the GPU. Resonance upscatter got a new special function. The unresolved resonance region got reduced to a one-dimensional probability model, now published in Nuclear Science and Engineering (2026).
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ANS Annual · 2022
Topology-optimized reactor cores
Let a deterministic neutronics solver and an optimizer decide where the fuel goes. Watch a uniform block rediscover a lattice on its own.
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reactor kinetics · C++
Horker++
A from-scratch high-order finite element spatial kinetics code. Nails the LRA prompt-supercritical benchmark with a single dependency.
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papers
Publications
Two new Nuclear Science and Engineering papers in 2026, plus windowed multipole resonance scattering, rejection sampling on SIMT hardware, 3D MOC on unstructured mesh, molten salt reactor depletion, and more.
full list →
in the press
How fast is a lethal dose from spent fuel?
A nuclear startup claimed you could hold its spent fuel for five minutes and receive roughly a CT scan's worth of radiation. I ran the numbers on what that fuel would actually do to a person in direct contact.
85 ms to a lethal dose