Dr. Kathryn Huff leads the Office of Nuclear Energy as the Assistant Secretary. Before joining the Department of Energy, she was a 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. She was previously 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 Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013 and her undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Chicago. Her research has focused on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles.

She has previously been an active member of the American Nuclear Society, a past chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division as well as the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and 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.