July 22, 2025 Three NEEP faculty receive tenure Written By: Lili Sarajian Departments: Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics Categories: Faculty The University of Wisconsin Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics is proud to announce that three faculty members received tenure, recognizing their excellence in teaching, innovative research, and dedicated service to the University and the global scientific community. “These three have already established their scientific leadership across a diverse set of disciplines that mirrors the breadth of expertise in our department,” says NEEP Chair Paul Wilson. “It will be exciting to watch them grow into leadership roles in NEEP as they drive our continued excellence and maintain our uniquely welcoming culture.” Juliana Pacheco Duarte Juliana Pacheco Duarte has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Her research focuses on safety analysis, thermal-hydraulics, and risk assessment of advanced nuclear systems. Her expertise encompasses experimental design for studying two-phase heat transfer phenomena at high-pressure conditions and computational thermal-hydraulic analysis using subchannel codes (COBRA, CTF) and system safety codes (TRACE, MELCOR). She currently applies her expertise to the design of fusion machines. Benedikt Geiger Benedikt Geiger was named a Grainger Institute for Engineering Associate Professor. Geiger is the Principal Investigator of the HSX experiment, an optimized stellarator that investigates the physics basis of future fusion power plants. His research group conducts plasma turbulence and transport studies at the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego, the NSTX spherical tokamak in Princeton, and the W7-X stellarator experiment in Greifswald, Germany. The Grainger Institute for Engineering is a multidisciplinary research institute that invests in faculty to support creative research and promote societal change. Yongfeng Zhang Yongfeng Zhang was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Zhang’s research aims to uncover the degradation mechanism in materials under extreme conditions such as radiation, high temperature, stress and corrosive media using microstructure-based modeling to track microstructure evolution and constructing structure-property correlations. This research will help predict material degradation rates and guide the development of novel materials for applications in extreme conditions.