As part of a flurry of Department of Energy appointments on Monday, the Joe Biden administration made nuclear engineering professor Kathryn Huff the acting head of DOE’s nuclear energy office.
Biden appointed Kathryn Huff principal deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy, second in command at the DOE office that oversees research on nuclear energy and fuel cycle technologies, according to a Monday press release from DOE. She’ll also be acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy (NE-1) while a permanent NE-1 is selected, Huff said in a Tweet Monday.
I’m thrilled to finally share that today is my 1st day in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (@Energy @GovNuclear).
I’m joining as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (NE2). I will also serve as its Acting Assistant Secretary (Acting @DOE_NE1).
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— katy huff (@katyhuff) May 10, 2021
The Senate will have to confirm a permanent assistant secretary for nuclear energy. The White House had yet to nominate anyone for the job at deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor. Rita Baranwal was the most recent Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Huff previously was a professor of nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the press release said. While part of the faculty, Huff led the university’s advanced reactors and fuel cycles research group and was an assistant professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. As a graduate student, she was a systems analysis research assistant at Idaho National Laboratory. She also worked as a research assistant at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center.
Huff received a Ph.D in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013, and a B.A. in physics from the University of Chicago, according to a copy of her CV posted to her professional website.
