Dr. Kathryn McCarthy, director of the US ITER Project at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been awarded the 2024 E. Gail de Planque Medal by the American Nuclear Society, or ANS. The E. Gail de Planque Medal recognizes exemplary accomplishments by a woman in the fields of nuclear science and engineering and will be presented November 18 at the opening plenary of the 2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida.
McCarthy was selected for her "enduring leadership, supported by a deep understanding of nuclear science and engineering, which has supported and continues to support national and international programs in both fusion and fission power engineering."
Since 2020, McCarthy has led US ITER, a DOE Office of Science project managed by ORNL with partner labs Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory. US ITER has the responsibility of designing, fabricating and delivering hardware the international ITER fusion project now under construction in France.
Prior to joining ORNL in 2020, McCarthy was the laboratory director and vice president for science and technology at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. She also previously held a variety of leadership and engineering roles at Idaho National Laboratory, including director of Domestic Programs in the Nuclear Science and Technology Directorate, director of the Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program Technical Integration Office, and national technical director for the Systems Analysis Campaign for the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy's Fuel Cycle R&D Program.
McCarthy began her career in fusion technology with a focus on liquid metal blanket designs. Early in her career she was a participant in the DOE US-USSR Young Scientist program, which included experience at scientific institutes in Russia and Latvia; she was also a guest scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. She earned her doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a major field of fusion engineering and minor fields of nuclear science and engineering and physics.
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