Congratulations to Dr. Nathan Hart, recipient of NC State’s College of Engineering
2021 Distinguished Dissertation Award. Nathan’s dissertation was entitled “A Residual-Based A Posteriori Spatial Error Estimator for the SN Neutron Transport Equation”.
“Dr. Hart’s dissertation addresses an important aspect of computational transport theory, namely error estimation, that is of rising importance due to the increasing reliance on modeling and simulation in the field of nuclear science and engineering. His work characterizes the confidence level in numerical results obtained from transport calculations using traditional estimators in the field. He also innovated a new estimator, the Residual Estimator, and established its promise. Nate’s work is of fundamental importance to nuclear computational science in general, and radiation transport computational methods in particular.” – Dr. Yousry Azmy, Committee Chair
Other dissertation committee members included Drs. Dmitriy Anistratov, Zhilin Li, Jon Dahl and Jose Duo.
Nathan is a native of Chicago, Illinois who always had an interest in building, science, and science fiction. Inspired by his father, a fire protection engineer, Nathan considered engineering as his path, obtaining his Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Engineering (2015) from the University of New Mexico before continuing at NC State University to obtain his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Nuclear Engineering (2020). He was a recipient of the US Department of Energy Integrated University Program Fellowship. Currently, Dr. Hart is a postdoctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory and works in the CCS-2: Computational Physics and Methods Division on the neutron transport code PARTISN.