July 18, 2022
By: Ashley Ritchie

Nuclear and radiological engineering Ph.D. students Jonathon Faulkner and Bailey Painter have each been awarded a three-year U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) graduate fellowship through the Office of Nuclear Energy’s (NE) University Nuclear Leadership Program (UNLP).

The fellowship will provide $52,000 annually to each recipient to help pay for graduate studies and research. The award also includes $5,000 to fund an internship at a U.S. national laboratory or other approved research facility to strengthen the ties between students and DOE's energy research programs.

The award will allow Faulkner to further his research on hybrid energy systems, aiming to synergistically combine the benefits of nuclear power—and in particular molten salt reactors—with solar energy and energy storage. He is a member of Professor Bojan Petrovic’s research group for Sustainable Nuclear Power.

The award will also support Painter’s research on the application of Multiphysics methods to the SHIFT and SERPENT Monte Carlo codes. He is a member of Assistant Professor Dan Kotlyar’s Computational Reactor Engineering Laboratory (CoRE).

Through UNLP, DOE is awarding more than $5 million in undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships to students pursuing nuclear engineering degrees and other nuclear science and engineering programs relevant to nuclear energy. The awards include 59 scholarships at 4-year institutions, 1 scholarship at a 2-year institution, and 28 fellowships for students at U.S. colleges and universities.

UNLP was previously known as the Integrated University Program (IUP). Since 2009, the program has awarded more than 900 scholarships and fellowships totaling approximately $55 million.