To exchange information among optical sensor researchers, data scientists, and advanced energy system developers; to foster crosscutting synergy; and to promote collaboration among universities, national laboratories, and industry.
Pattrick Calderoni, Department of Energy
Pattrick Calderoni is the National Technical Director of the Advanced Sensor and Instrumentation program, which is an element of the Department of Energy, Nuclear Energy research portfolio. He also acts as the Senior Technical Advisor for the Idaho National Laboratory Fusion Safety Program. Dr. Calderoni has more than 20 years’ experience in the development of fission and fusion energy systems and testing of nuclear components. In addition to sensors, his technical expertise includes molten salt reactors and tritium technology. He holds a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering and has received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Christian Petrie, Oak Ridge National Lab
Dr. Christian Petrie is a Senior R&D Staff member and Leader for the Advanced Fuel Fabrication and Instrumentation Group of the Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research focus on the development and accelerated qualification of nuclear fuels, materials, and sensors. He is a recognized expert on fiber optic sensing for nuclear energy applications, including fundamental radiation effects, sensing mechanisms, and integration of sensors into nuclear fuels and materials using various additive manufacturing techniques. He currently serves as the Focus Area Lead for Sensors for Advanced Reactors under the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy’s Advanced Sensors and Instrumentation Program in addition to other programmatic roles in the areas of sensing, irradiation testing, and additive manufacturing.
Paul Gerber, Naval Nuclear Laboratory
Paul has his BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has worked at NNL for 26 years. Paul has experience with testing, thermal hydraulics, acoustics, and structural analysis. For the last 5 years Paul has been leading NNL development of fiber optic sensing systems. Prior to working at NNL, Paul worked at PCB Piezotronics Inc. for 4 years where he designed, tested, analyzed and developed piezoelectric accelerometers, shock transducers, and dynamic pressure transducers.
Michael Buric, National Energy Technology Laboratory
Dr. Michael P. Buric is a research scientist at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia in the Lab’s Research and Innovation Center on the Functional Materials Development Team. His current research interests include the modeling and fabrication of fiber-based optical sensors and devices, harsh-environment sensing for energy applications, Laser-heated pedestal growth of single-crystal optical fibers, novel waveguide fabrication, distributed sensing, fiber embedding, additive manufacturing, and applications of Raman spectroscopy. Dr. Buric currently has been awarded several patents and is published extensively in the proceedings of the SPIE and elsewhere. He was a recipient of SPIE’s 2017 Rising Researcher Award and a 2020 Carnegie Science Center Innovation Award in Energy. He received a 2022 R&D 100 Award for NuSense technology in conjunction with University of Pittsburgh entrepeneurs. He is also the lead Laser Safety Officer at NETL in addition to overseeing several energy-related research projects.
Ming-Jun Li, Corning Inc.
Dr. Ming-Jun Li joined Corning in 1991 and is currently a Corporate Fellow. He has contributed to many single mode and multimode fiber products for optical communications and specialty fibers for different applications. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of Optica and IEEE. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. He received the 2023 John Tyndall Award. He has served as Associate Editor and Coordinating Committee Member, and currently is Deputy Editor for Journal of Lightwave Technology. He has also served as a guest editor for several special issues and as committee chair or member for many international conferences. He holds over 260 U.S. patents and has published 7 book chapters and authored over 350 technical papers.
Kevin Chen, University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Kevin Chen is Paul E. Lego Chair Professor of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). He joined Pitt after completing his PhD training at the University of Toronto in 2002. Kevin's research group studies optics sciences in laser matter interaction and perform multi-domain research in optical sensors. Kevin is co-author of over 300 technical publications, over a dozen US patents, and recipient of various research awards including Carnegie Science Award in Energy and R&D 100 award.
Alexander Heifetz, Argonne National laboratory
Dr. Alexander (Alex) Heifetz is currently a Principal Engineer with the Nuclear Science and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received BS in Engineering Science, MS in Physics, PhD in Electrical Engineering, all from Northwestern University. Alex first joined Argonne as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow in 2008. At Argonne, his work has involved development of optical, microwave, and ultrasonic devices and systems, and signal processing algorithms, for enabling technology in nuclear energy and security. Specific research projects focused on machine learning for thermal hydraulic sensing and nuclear security, high temperature fluid sensing, nondestructive evaluation for additive manufacturing, remote sensing, and quantum information. Alex has authored 45 peer-reviewed journal papers, 60 conference papers, and received 3 US Patents. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of ANS and APS. Alex is a co-recipient of two Best Paper Awards at the 2019 and 2020 IEEE international Conference on Electro-Information Technology (EIT), and a Best Paper Award at the ANS Student Conference 2022. Alex is an Adjunct Professor with Civil, Materials and Environmental Engineering (CMEE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Member of Northwestern Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering.
Thomas Tweedle, Westinghouse Electric Company LLC.
Tom Tweedle is a Fellow Engineer in the Advanced Reactors & Engineering department at Westinghouse Electric Company. Tom has more than 16 years of experience at Westinghouse Electric Company. His expertise resides in Instrumentation and Controls (I&C) system design, implementation, and validation with a focus on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology, advanced sensors, and embedded systems. Currently, Tom is the technical lead for the Advanced Logic System version 2 platform, technical lead for the eVinci I&C system and technical lead for eVinci advanced sensors.
Albert To, University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Albert To is currently a William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests lie in design optimization, fast process modeling, and process-microstructure-property relationship for metal additive manufacturing. The computational methods his group developed for additive manufacturing have been adopted and commercialized by engineering simulation software companies. Professor To has over 130 peer-reviewed journal publications in journals such as Additive Manufacturing, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Materials, and Scripta Materialia. He is currently an associate editor for Additive Manufacturing in charge of the modeling and simulation area. He has been a recipient of the NSF BRIGE Award in 2009, the Board of Visitors Faculty Award from the School of Engineering in 2016, and the Carnegie Science Award in the Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Category in 2018.
Eva Rodezno, Department of Energy
Eva Rodezno is an engineer in the Hydrogen with Carbon Management division of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM). She is the program manager for FECM’s Sensors, Controls and Novel Concepts and Simulation Based Engineering Programs. She is also involved with the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as it pertains to fossil-based hydrogen with CCS. She has spent all of her professional career managing R&D projects for different federal agencies. Prior to working for the Department of Energy, she worked for the U.S. Department of Transportation in both the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration. She was also a contractor to the Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command. She has overseen research portfolios on a variety of topics – everything from lithium battery safety to liquified natural gas transportation by rail. She has a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and a master’s degree in Management from the University of Maryland.
Jyotsna Sharma, Louisiana State University
Dr. Jyotsna Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Petroleum Engineering and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, at Louisiana State University (LSU). She joined LSU in 2019, after working in the energy industry for 8+ years at Chevron, Schlumberger, and Shell. Dr. Sharma was extensively involved in Chevron’s fiber-optic monitoring program and led fiber installations in wells for monitoring steam injection operations in the US, Indonesia, and Venezuela. At Schlumberger, Dr. Sharma served as a Field Engineer and deployed sensors for subsurface surveillance. Since joining LSU in 2019, she has published 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, and received one patent with two others pending, in the area of fiber-optic sensing and machine learning. Dr. Sharma has led numerous projects funded through federal, state, and industry grants. She has a multi-disciplinary academic background with a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from the University of Calgary, Canada, and a B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India.
Amanda M. Lines, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Dr. Amanda Lines is a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with experience in the design and deployment of on-line monitoring and sensor technology. Dr. Lines graduated from Washington State University with her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry after earning her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering from Purdue University.
Yongfeng Lu, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Dr. Yongfeng Lu is currently the Lott Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). He received his bachelor degree from Tsinghua University (China) in 1984 and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University (Japan) in 1988 and 1991, all in electrical engineering. From 1991 to 2002, he was a faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National University of Singapore. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at UNL in 2002. He has more than 30 years of experience in processing and characterization of micro/nanostructured materials.
Indra Chakraborty, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Dr. Indrasis Chakraborty is a Senior Data Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Controls and a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics. Dr. Chakraborty brings in expertise in data-driven control techniques, system identification, time-series forecasting and dimensionality reduction, with application to energy systems. Dr. Chakraborty is currently leading “GMLC 3.3.3: Incipient Failure Identification for Common Grid Asset Classes”, under which GridDS was developed.
Patrick Chan, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
Dr. Patrick Hon Man Chan is a fiber optics researcher at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, working in improvement upon various aspects of current fiber optics sensing system (FOSS) for wide-spread deployment. He has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Material Science and Engineering from University of California, Irvine. Dr. Chan has published numerous journal papers related to fiber technology, and is currently conducting research on fiber sensors capable of measuring cryogenic temperature on liquid fluids.
Gary Pickrell, Virginia Tech
Gary Pickrell is a Professor in Materials Science and Engineering; Associate Director of the Center for Photonics Technology in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Virginia Tech; and the Rolls Royce Commonwealth Director and Technical Advisory Board voting member to CCAM, Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing. He has been honored as a Fellow of SPIE (2016), Senior member of IEEE (2010), Faculty Fellow (2007), Outstanding Assistant Professor (2005), and R&D 100 award (2004). He has over 200 publications, including 18 books, 4 special Journal issues, and 18 patents issued. He has chaired ~ 25 international conferences, served on the organizing committee for ~ 40 conferences and has been the PI on over $8 million in funded research and a PI/coPI on over $15 million while at Virginia Tech. Previous to academia, he held various industrial positions such as process engineer, R&D Scientist, Technical Director, and member of the Board of Directors for various organizations. He has served on many technical advisory boards and review panels for both industry and government including NSF, DOE and twice on a Triennial Review of Naval Research Lab facilities, personnel and research projects. He is a consultant in the area of advanced experimental design techniques, process improvement strategies and various aspects of materials product and process optimization.
Ruishu Wright, National Energy Technology Laboratory
Dr. Ruishu F. Wright is a Research Physical Scientist on the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s Functional Materials Team. She serves as Technical Portfolio Lead for Natural Gas Infrastructure FWP and Principal Investigator for multiple projects and coordinates R&D efforts of an interdisciplinary team to develop real-time sensors and functional sensitive materials to monitor and mitigate corrosion and gas leaks of natural gas pipelines, support safe hydrogen transportation and H2@scale projects, enable subsurface geochemical monitoring in support of subsurface hydrogen-natural gas storage, wellbore integrity monitoring of carbon storage wells and plugged abandoned wells. Dr. Wright holds a Ph.D. in Energy and Mineral Engineering and Electrochemical Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. She earned her M.S. in Chemical Engineering and Technology and B.S. in Metallurgical Science and Engineering. She has published more than 40 technical articles and given more than 30 presentations at conferences and holds 7 pending and awarded U.S. patents on sensor technologies.
Elvis Dominguez-Ontiveros, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Dr. Dominguez-Ontiveros holds B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the National Polytechnique Institute, Mexico. He received a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University. His research work focuses on Experimental and Computational fluid flow and heat transfer behavior on reactor system components. Dr. Dominguez-Ontiveros joined the staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in June 2015. His primary expertise is in reactor thermal hydraulic phenomena for Light Water Reactors and GenIV reactors.