Tingshiuan Wu, a final-year NERS PhD student and a member of the Applied Nuclear Science Group under Prof. Igor Jovanovic, has been given the best student poster presentation award at the MARC XII (Methods and Applications of Radioanalytical Chemistry) Conference held in Kona, Hawaii, in April 2022. The MARC conference is held every three years and is a major international platform that discusses advances in radioanalytical chemistry and radiochemistry, with emphasis on new applications.
“I was actually a bit surprised to win this as I did see many great posters at the conference,” said Wu, whose poster is on using Bayesian updating to find the incoming direction of neutrons. “Essentially by locating where interaction occurs, we try to reconstruct the origin of the source with as few neutrons as possible.”
Wu also extended the study from recoil-only detectors, as done previously, to detectors utilizing both recoil and neutron captures. This project has been built off the SANDD antineutrino monitoring detector working closely with a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and aims to extend the application to nuclear safeguards.
Wu, who hails from Salt Lake City, Utah, completed his BS (Hons) degree in physics at the University of Utah with a minor in nuclear Engineering before joining NERS as a PhD student in 2017. He served as the secretary of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM) Student Chapter at U-M for 2019–20 and participated in Graduate Student Council activities before the pandemic.
“Thus far, it has been the first significant award I have received in my graduate studies, so I am quite pleased with the outcome,” said Wu.
Wu’s plans for the future are currently open, he is looking forward to a fulfilling career in either a national laboratory or even in the industry.
