Kathryn (Katy) Huff is a Swanlund Professor and Chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics. a nuclear Her research interests focus on advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles, multi-physics simulation, energy systems analysis, scientific computation, and nuclear energy policy. Previous to joining NEEP, Katy was an Associate Professor of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she founded the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles group.
In addition to the research pursued by her ARFC group, Katy has served in a number of academic, advisory, and public service roles. From 2021 to 2024, she held senior leadership positions in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, including Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Acting Assistant Secretary, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy, and Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy. In that role, she led nuclear energy policy, managed a multibillion-dollar research and development portfolio, and coordinated work across national laboratories, universities, and industry.
Katy earned her BA in Physics from the University of Chicago in 2008 and her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. During her graduate and early research career, she held research appointments at Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Universidad de Chile, and the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. After completing her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and a Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Katy is active in the American Nuclear Society, including leadership in the Mathematics and Computation Division, Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division, and the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division. She has received the ANS Young Member Excellence Award, the Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement Award, an ANS Presidential Citation, and the ANS Distinguished Public Service Award. Through 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.