UCF to Lead $5M Consortium to Train Nuclear Engineers
The goal is to develop a pipeline of nuclear engineers and scientists who can protect the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
UCF has continuously been recognized as a top supplier of graduates to the aerospace and defense industries, and two UCF professors plan to solidify that reputation through a new national consortium.
Professors Subith Vasu and Jayanta Kapat are leading a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to establish a consortium that will support students from underrepresented communities who are interested in earning engineering degrees.
The PARtnership and Training for NNSA Engineering and Relevant Sciences (PARTNERS) consortium will include the University of California, Irvine and the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU). Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory will collaborate and support students and faculty.
The goal of PARTNERS is to provide a training ground and talent pipeline for the next generation of nuclear engineers.
“The U.S. has a nuclear stockpile and the NNSA is responsible for the safe maintenance and modernization of that stockpile,” Vasu says. “This particular opportunity allows us to conduct research and train students. The hope is that, after graduation, these students will get a job offer from the NNSA or related industries.”
This is the second NNSA consortium that UCF has joined under Vasu’s leadership. In 2023, the university entered a $25-million, national consortium on nuclear forensics that was directed by the University of Florida.
Justin Urso ’15 ’22PhD, a co-principal investigator (PI) on the grant, says this new consortium, led by UCF this time, will augment the work already completed by the group of universities and national labs. On the research side, students and faculty will continue to work on projects that can predict and assess the damage from nuclear events and assist with nuclear forensics.
Students will have the opportunity to work on these projects, but they also have the chance to intern at one of the national labs in the consortium. They will be paired with a mentor and will continue to develop their research skills and train for a career in nuclear engineering under their guidance.
“The current nuclear engineering workforce is retiring but also the world is changing,” Vasu says. “The U.S. is the world police, and we need to make sure that nuclear weapons are only with responsible countries. The threats against the U.S. are also changing. Our enemies have newer, more sophisticated weapons.”
Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semiautonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that protects our nation by designing and delivering a safe, secure, reliable and effective U.S. nuclear stockpile; forging solutions that enable global security and stability through nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and emergency response; providing nuclear propulsion to power a global U.S. Navy; and leveraging transformative technologies to address emerging challenges.
About the Researchers
Vasu received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and joined UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2012. He is a member of UCF’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research and is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Vasu is a recipient of DARPA’s Director’s Fellowship, DARPA Young Faculty award, the Young Investigator grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, American Chemical Society’s Doctoral New Investigator, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Dilip Ballal Early Career award, and the Society of Automotive Engineers SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational award. He has received many of the highest honors at UCF including the UCF Luminary, Trustee Chair Professor and Reach for the Stars awards. Several of his former students are employed by the NNSA, aerospace, energy and defense entities.
Kapat is a Pegasus Professor and the director of the Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research. The most significant impact of Kapat’s work stems from his vision for CATER. He brought 10 core faculty members with multidisciplinary capabilities together to solve some of the most complex research problems in turbomachinery for power generation, aviation and space propulsion. Through CATER, Kapat has facilitated graduate-level research and degrees and has established excellent success rates for internship and job placement of students at all levels. Because of the international reputation of CATER, high-caliber students from Brazil, France, Germany and India now come to UCF.
Urso is a research assistant professor at CATER. He earned his bachelor’s from UCF in 2015 and completed his doctoral degree at UCF in 2022 as a Graduate Dean’s Fellowship Recipient under Vasu. He has over 30 publications and has been involved in mentoring efforts targeting undergraduate and K-12 students in STEM.