Brian Wirth is Governor’s Chair Professor of Computational Nuclear Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Professor Wirth’s research investigates the performance of nuclear fuels, structural materials and plasma facing components in nuclear fission and fusion environments, utilizing computational materials modeling complemented by experimental investigation. Brian received a BS in nuclear engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992 and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998. Dr. Wirth spent four years in the High Performance Computational Materials Science Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 2002 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. In 2010, he moved to the University of Tennessee as a UTK-ORNL Governor’s Chair Professor. He has received many awards, including the 2014 U.S. Department of Energy Ernest O. Lawrence Award in Energy Science and Innovation, the 2016 Mishima Award from the American Nuclear Society for outstanding work in nuclear fuels and materials research and the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Dr. Wirth is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2016 Fellow, Physics Section) and the American Nuclear Society (ANS, 2017 Fellow).