The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has named Dr. Mihai A. Diaconeasa, Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University, to its 2025 Mechanical Engineering Magazine Watch List. Launched in 2024, the annual Watch List spotlights early career professionals who have already left their marks on industry, academia, and society. Nominees were evaluated by the Mechanical Engineering editorial team based on their demonstrated impact, strong potential for advancement in their field, and engagement with the broader community advocating for the engineering profession. Dr. Diaconeasa was selected for his work on analytically developing and computationally solving a discretized form of the master equation that describes the time evolution of nuclear reactors under human control, treating the system as a probabilistic combination of states at any given time. His research builds from two specialized forms of this equation—the Fokker-Planck and Chapman-Kolmogorov equations—to address reactor dynamics under a wide range of conditions.
Dr. Mihai Diaconeasa is an internationally recognized expert in probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), reliability, and resilience engineering for complex systems. He currently serves as Chair of the ASME Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis Division (SERAD) Executive Committee and the ANS Nuclear Installations Safety Division (NISD), and Vice Chair of the ANS Advanced Reactor Working Group. Dr. Diaconeasa is the founder of OpenPRA.org and leads the design and development of ADS-IDAC, a dynamic PRA methodology for nuclear power applications.
He has contributed significantly to standards development as Chair of the ANS-30.2 Standards Committee and as Vice Chair of ASME’s Probabilistic Design Methods Subcommittee. He received the ANS David Okrent Award for Nuclear Safety in recognition of his pioneering work in simulation-based PRA methods for both current and next-generation reactors.
Dr. Diaconeasa has held key leadership roles at major conferences, including Associate General Chair of PSAM-14, Publications Chair of PSA 2023, and Technical Program Chair for ARS 2026. His research has supported critical risk-informed decisions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, underscoring his impact across multiple high-consequence sectors.