Afternoon sunlight streams through the fall foliage at Wolf Plaza. Photo by Becky Kirkland.

NC State Nuclear Engineering welcomes four tenure track faculty members

Left to right: He, Lietz, Laggner & Kautz

 

The Department welcomes four new tenure track faculty members this academic year 2022-23. With these additions, NC State Nuclear Engineering has a total of twenty-seven tenured/tenure track, one research, three teaching, and five emeritus faculty members.

Dr. Lingfeng He, Associate Professor, joined the department on August 16, 2022. He received his B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from the Central South University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009. He was a postdoctoral researcher and assistant scientist at Nagaoka University of Technology, Japan, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining Idaho National Laboratory (INL) as a staff scientist in 2014. He was a distinguished staff scientist (Level V) and High-Resolution Materials Characterization group lead at INL prior to joining NC State as an Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering in 08/2022. His research focuses on materials behavior in extreme environments, with a focus on environmental degradation of materials in nuclear power systems. He aims to understand how the processing and radiation/corrosion environments affects the microstructure, mechanical/thermal properties, and structural integrity/durability of materials and components.

Dr. Amanda Lietz, Assistant Professor, also joined the department on August 16, 2022. Lietz received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan in 2019 and a BS in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was the recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Towner Prize for Outstanding PhD Research. Before joining NC State, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in the Applied Optical and Plasma Sciences Department. Her research is focused on computational modeling of low temperature plasmas for a variety of practical industrial applications.

Dr. Florian Laggner, Assistant Professor, will join the department on October 1, 2022. Laggner received his PhD in Technical Sciences from the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) at the TU Wien in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Vienna, Austria & Garching, Germany in 2017. He received both his MS (2013) and BS (2011) in “Technical Physics” from the TU Wien in Vienna, Austria. Florian is a post-doctoral research associate in the Plasma Control Group at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Dr. Elizabeth Kautz, Assistant Professor, will join the department on January 1, 2023. Kautz received her BS in Materials Engineering in 2010 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. From 2010-2014 she worked at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL, Schenectady, NY) as a Materials Engineer. She received her MS and PhD in Materials Engineering from RPI in 2014 and 2018, respectively. She was a post-doctoral researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, WA from 2018-2020, and a staff scientist at PNNL from 2020-2022 prior to joining the NC State faculty. Her research is focused on materials detection, monitoring, and degradation phenomena relevant to nuclear energy, defense, forensics, and non-proliferation applications.