New Faculty

Dr. Bingjing Su joined the NRE faculty in January 1 and this quarter is teaching his first UC NRE class, Monte Carlo Methods. The class has been well received and has an enrollment of 18 students, including several from Environmental Engineering.

Prof. Su has also recently been awarded a two-year research grant from the DOE Nuclear Engineering and Education Research (NEER) program. His research will investigate the numerical aspects of using the "Maximum Entropy Eddington Factor in transport calculations". Dr. Su's proposal was one of the nineteen proposals selected for NEER program. The starting date for the project is July 1, 1998.

Recent Activities

• Three undergraduate students, six graduates, one post-doc and one faculty member attended the 1998 Northern Region student ANS conference in Ann Arbor Michigan, April 3-5. The UC contingent was one of the largest mid-western delegations attending this meeting, except for the students from the host school who treated their guests very well and put on a well-organized conference.

• Henry Spitz has completed the construction of a new anthropometric human knee calibration phantom for in-vivo measurements of bone-seeking radioactive materials. Initial inter-comparison phantom measurements were performed at the New York University Medical Center March 16 & 17.

• The fifth Ohio State University - University of Cincinnati joint quarterly seminar series started on April 6. The seminar utilizes the electronic classrooms on the UC and OSU campuses with half of the presentations originating from each campus. Nine seminar speakers are scheduled for this quarter.

• John Christenson made an invited presentation on March 26 to the Ohio Mechanical, Industrial & Manufacturing (MIN) Department Heads Organization on the use of a bidirectional video communication link for collaborative instruction and seminars. His presentation drew on nearly 5 years of collaborative experience with the OSU Nuclear Engineering Program using this means of communication for the real time audio & visual linkage of two class rooms located on the Columbus and Cincinnati campuses.

New Research Projects

• The National Science Foundation Biomedical Engineering Division CAREER program has funded a 4 year $200k ($50k/yr) project for UC to develop a novel medical imaging camera, as well as instructional animations of physical processes such as pulse generation in different detectors. The division evaluated 39 proposals, of which 6 were funded. The principal investigator is Dr. John Valentine.

• NASA has funded a 3-year, $525,000 project for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and UC to develop a large volume CdZnTe gamma-ray spectroscopy detector. UC receives $45k ($15k/yr) and LANL will directly support one graduate student (plus travel) who will work at least half-time at Los Alamos. Prof. valentine is the Project Director.

Recent Conference Presentations

• "High Efficiency CdZnTe Gamma-Ray Detectors for Planetary Missions", C.E Moss, T.H Prettyman, R.C Reedy, and J.D Valentine, Paper presented at the 1998 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Houston, Tx, (March, 1998).

• "The Effects of Parameter Variation on MSET Models of Nuclear Power Plants Feedwater Flow System", A. Miron, S. Wegerich, F. Yue, K. Gross, J. Christenson, Paper presented at the 1998 Northern Regional Student ANS Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, (April, 1998).

Papers Recently Accepted for Conference Presentations

• "Area, Centroid, and Full-Width at Half Maximum Uncertainities of Histogrammed Data with Underlying Gaussian Distribution - The Three Point Gaussian Method", J. Li, A. Rana, and J.D Valentine, Paper accepted for presentation at the 1998 Symposium on Radiation Measurements and Applications, Ann Arbor, MI (May, 1998).

• "Airborne Radioxenon Detection Using Fluid Transfer Concentration", W.R Russ, B.D Rooney, K.C Gross, and J.D Valentine, Paper accepted for presentation at the 1998 Symposium on Radiation Measurements and Applications, Ann Arbor, MI (May, 1998).

• "A Bayes-Markov Inverse procedure for Radioacive Contaminant transport in Fractured Rock", Nela Zavaljevski, Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Nashville, TN (June, 1998).

• "Atmospheric dispersion under various stability classes", Shoaib Usman, H. Spitz, Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Nashville, TN (June, 1998).

• "The Effects of Parameter Variation on MSET models of the Crystal River-3 Feedwater Flow System", A. Miron, S. Wegerich, F. Yue, K. Gross, J. Christenson, Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Nashville, TN (June, 1998).

• "Nurturing an Effective University-Industry Partnership", Brian Hajek, John Christenson, Eugene Rutz, Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Nashville, TN (June, 1998).