U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm issued the following statement on President Biden’s intent to nominate Dr. Kathryn Huff for Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE):
“I am thrilled that President Biden has nominated Dr. Kathryn Huff to serve as Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at DOE. Dr. Huff has been a trailblazer for her entire career as a leading nuclear scientist, and she brings endless enthusiasm and curiosity to her work. If confirmed, she would continue her groundbreaking work at DOE to advance zero-carbon nuclear energy technologies to tackle the climate crisis and provide affordable, secure, and reliable energy for all Americans. I am deeply grateful for Dr. Huff’s willingness to serve the American people, and look forward to her speedy confirmation.”
Dr. Kathryn Huff has served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy since May 2021. Prior to that role, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. Huff was also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Previously, Huff was a Postdoctoral Fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California-Berkeley. She received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013, and her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago. Huff is an active member of the American Nuclear Society and is a Past Chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division, Past Chair of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and a recipient of both the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement awards. Through leadership within Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Hacker Within, and the Journal of Open-Source Software, she has also advocated for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing.
