Dr. Zeinab Alsmadi joins the faculty as Assistant Teaching Professor of Nuclear Engineering in August 2023. She teaches an undergraduate course in nuclear energy and senior graduate level courses in particle material interaction and laboratory projects in nuclear engineering. Alsmadi’s research work focuses on understanding the relationship between microstructure, processing, mechanical properties, and functionality of materials for nuclear energy systems, and on the assessment of shielding and corrosion properties of single-layered and multi-layered coating barriers on the inner canister of spent nuclear fuel waste storage such as dry casks, and the assessment of different stainless-steel alloys as candidate canister materials as well as candidate structural materials for other nuclear systems, to enhance their radiation shielding efficiency and corrosion resistance.
Alsmadi was a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department from 2020 to 2023. In 2020 Zeinab received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from NC State University. The dissertation entitled “High Temperature Creep-Fatigue Behavior of Alloy 709 Austenitic Stainless Steel in Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactors” was supervised by Dr. Korukonda Murty. A Master of Materials Science and Engineering (MMSE) was also completed at NC State University. In 2016 she completed a Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Engineering at the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST).
Dr. Wen Jiang joins the faculty as Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering also starting August 2023. Jiang expands the nuclear materials and fuel research area for the Department.
He was a computational scientist with the Computational Mechanics and Materials Department at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Jiang led the development of TRISO fuel modeling in INL’s BISON fuel performance code. He also actively contributed to the open-source MOOSE simulation framework and MOOSE Application Library for Advanced Manufacturing UTilitiEs (MALAMUTE).
Jiang received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from the Duke University in 2015 and MS and BS in Aeronautic Science and Engineering from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2009 and 2007. After the completion of his doctoral degree, he joined INL and worked in computational method development and materials modeling. His research focused on the development of new numerical methods for multi-physics and multi-scale modeling of nuclear fuel and structural materials, with a particular emphasis on the important role played by interfaces and damages.