Title: "Nuclear Nonproliferation and Security in a Changing World"

Abstract
Global nuclear energy development gives many reasons to ensure its pursuit: climate change, energy security, growth of electricity demand, and socio-political factors. While the impact is big, so are the impeding issues commonly associate with nuclear power, such as waste and proliferation and security of nuclear materials. In a fast-paced world, the approach to nuclear nonproliferation and security demands dynamic solutions. In this seminar, I will primarily discuss the Consortium for Enabling Technologies and Innovation, representing a team of fourteen institutions of higher education (IHE) and twelve national laboratories, committed to promoting the spirit of collaborative intelligence. The unique mission of the ETI Consortium is to direct the research and innovation to enable the technologies that support the NNSA’s mission, to train the next-generation of human capital, and to bridge the gap between the university basic research and national laboratories mission-specific applications. The differentiating approach that we adopt to support the mission is to create a truly collaborative environment: the umbrella of data science to support the critical areas of enabling research of novel detectors and advanced manufacturing in nuclear nonproliferation. I will conclude the seminar with a brief overview of the research at the GT’s Laboratory for Advanced Nonproliferation and Safety, including recent developments in antineutrino monitoring of nuclear reactors and active interrogation of cargo containers in support of homeland security.

Bio
Anna Erickson earner her MS and PhD in Nuclear Science and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 and 2011, respectively. She is an Associate Professor of Nuclear and Radiological Engineering, an adjunct professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and the leader of the Laboratory for Advanced Nonproliferation and Safety. Her research is focused on bridging a critical gap between the reactor engineering and nuclear nonproliferation communities by integrating theoretical reactor analysis and design and experimental detection. Erickson is the Director of the Consortium for Enabling Technologies and Innovation, which is composed of fourteen institutions of higher education and twelve national laboratories with an objective to create a research and education environment to support cross-cutting technologies for nuclear nonproliferation. She is a co-author of Active Interrogation in Nuclear Security: Science, Technology, and Systems, published by Nature Springer in 2018, and over a hundred of journal publications, conference proceedings and presentations. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the American Nuclear Society.