M.S. '18, current PhD candidate
Nuclear materials with Prof. Short
aliciae@mit.edu
(she/her)
After receiving her masters degree from MIT in 2018 and serving as a Communication Fellow from 2016-2018, Alicia worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and IERUS Technologies as a scientific software developer for 5 years. At MIT and ORNL, she developed mechanistic computational models to predict corrosion and fouling in pressurized water reactors in order to mitigate the deleterious operational consequences of crud; at IERUS, she developed commercial computational electromagnetics modeling and simulation software. Her experience working on the crud corrosion problem motivated her to return to graduate school to develop technical expertise in nuclear materials and radiation effects, in order to work toward bridging the gap between experimental nuclear materials science and predictive engineering-scale computational multiphysics modeling and simulation to enable design, licensing and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors. She returned to campus in 2023 to complete her PhD in the research group of Professor Mike Short and resume her work with the Comm Lab. Her research is focused on quantifying and understanding the effects of radiation damage on materials in nuclear reactor systems using both experimental and computational methods. When she’s not in the lab, you’ll probably find her either experimentally testing and tinkering with new espresso and coffee brewing methods, or rock climbing somewhere in New Hampshire.