Senior Scientific Engineering Associate
My name is Micah and I have a BSc, MSc, and PhD in nuclear engineering, and I enjoy all sorts of technical work, including programming, algorithms, experiments, wrangling big data – the list is very long. I have spent the last 10 years doing scientific research, developing radiation sensors for nuclear security and safeguards applications. These sensors are some of the tools that law enforcement use to search for nuclear material being smuggled, or that inspectors use to verify arms control treaties. These tools are important, and they’re also really cool, combining a lot of different flavors of engineering, such as nuclear physics, materials science, electronics, and computer science.
My time as a scientific researcher taught me numerous important skills, such as being able to digest large quantities of complex information from journal papers quickly, and being able to improvise when I hit an unexpected obstacle while performing an experiment. I’ve been extremely fortunate, having worked with brilliant and talented scientists at some of the top institutions in the country. They taught me a lot and I got to see some very cool stuff in the process – heavily guarded nuclear material storage and processing facilities, old reactors, new reactors, and a litany of world-class scientific experiments like LIGO.
I recently started a new job in the Applied Nuclear Physics group at LBNL, as a Senior Scientific Engineering Associate, where I work on software and hardware development of portable, free-moving radiation sensors capable of producing 3D radiation maps of a scene.