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Alireza Haghighat

Director of Nuclear Engineering Program
  • Robert E. Hord Jr. Professor
  • Thrust Area Specialty: Nuclear Engineering Systems
Alireza Haghighat
Virginia Tech Research Center (VTRC)
900 N. Glebe Road
Arlington, VA 22203
haghighat@vt.edu
(571) 858-3795

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Research Interests

Development of advanced particle transport methods

  • Multi-stage, Response-function particle Transport (MRT) methodology and its application
  • Hybrid parallel numerical (Sn, Method of Characteristic, Ray-Tracing & Fictitious Quadrature) particle transport theory methods
  • Automated variance reduction techniques for fixed-source and eigenvalue Monte Carlo calculations, e.g., CADIS - Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling**

Development of advanced particle transport codes

  • PENTRAN
  • TITAN
  • A3MCNP
  • INSPCT-s
  • AIMS
  • TITAN-IR
  • RAPID

Development of collaborative Virtual Reality Systems for Scientific Computing

Application of Particle Transport Methods and Codes for design and analysis of nuclear systems (with application to power, security and nonproliferation, and medicine):

Advanced reactor core designs (molten salt and solid fuel)

  • Computational methods in reactor physics and shielding
  • Algorithms for image reconstruction in medical devices
  • Advanced algorithms for generation of multigroup nuclear cross sections
  • Sensitivity, perturbation methods and uncertainty quantification

See Dr. Haghighat's publications and research on Google Scholar.

  • 2017-Present, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech
  • 2016-Present, Director, Nuclear Engineering Program
  • 2011-Present, Professor, Nuclear Engineering, Director of NSEL at Arlington
  • 2009–2011, Endowed Chair Professor, Florida Power & Light
  • 2008–2010, Director of University of Florida Training Reactor
  • 2001-2009, Professor and Chair, University of Florida
  • 2008–2009, Interim Director, University of Florida Training Reactor 2004–Present, Interim Director, Florida Institute of Nuclear Detection & Security (FINDS)
  • 2005–Present, President and CEO of HSW Technologies, LLC
  • 2006–2007, Chair, Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization (NEDHO)
  • 1998-2001, Professor, Pennsylvania State University
  • 1998, Visiting Scientist at SCK•CEN, Mol, Belgium
  • 1993, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University
  • 1990, Faculty Research Participant, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Engineering, Physics and Mathematics Division (EPMD)
  • 1989, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
  • 1988, Research Associate, Pennsylvania State University
  • 1986, Research Assistant, Pennsylvania State University
  • 2011 - ANS Radiation Protection and Shielding Division’s Professional Excellence Award
  • 2009 - Florida Power & Light Endowed Term Professorship
  • 2009 - Recipient of a recognition award from DOE for leadership & contributions to design and analysis for the UFTR HEU to LEU fuel conversion
  • 2002 - ANS Fellow, Pioneering contributions to the development of accurate and efficient deterministic and stochastic particle transport theory methods 
  • Ph.D. - Nuclear Engineering, University of Washington, 1986
  • M.S. - Nuclear Engineering, University of Washington, 1981
  • B.S. - Physics, Pahlavi (Shiraz) University, 1978