Alastair Big Luna (PhDME ’25) speaks deliberately and calmly, even though he’s unsure what the next chapter of his life will bring. As a father of three who moved across the country during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to pursue a PhD in a new field—at the same time his wife reinvented her career—he’s navigated his fair share of uncertainty and stress.
“I feel very optimistic that something good will come out of getting a PhD,” says the 45-year-old.
A member of the Navajo Nation and a financial analyst-turned-engineer, Big Luna successfully defended his dissertation on advanced sensing technology for nuclear energy systems in January 2025. He’s among the roughly 90 engineering doctoral graduates who will walk across the Kohl Center stage on Friday, May 9, 2025, to kick off the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s weekend of spring commencement festivities.
Big Luna was analyzing the finances of alternative energy investments for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in 2016 when a downturn in oil prices led to his job being cut. Having been interested in the engineering side of his organization’s clean energy work, he decided then and there to go back to school. And so he returned to Fort Lewis College in his adopted hometown of Durango, Colorado, as a nontraditional student—nearly two decades after earning his first degree from the school.
The professor who became his mentor, Badger engineering alumnus Billy Nollet (MSNEEP ’11, PhDNEEP ’13), urged him to consider a PhD—specifically, at UW-Madison.
“He convinced me that UW has a great program and also that it would be a good place for my kids,” says Big Luna, who has 17-year-old twin daughters and an 11-year-old son. “And he was right.”
That’s not to say Big Luna’s time in Madison has been easy. He arrived in 2020, amid the pandemic, when research labs were closed to in-person activities. After his wife completed the UW-Madison School of Nursing’s accelerated bachelor’s program and took a full-time job at the UW Hospital, Big Luna assumed primary caregiver responsibilities for three kids who were still acclimating to a new place. The entire family was away from the support network they’d built during 20 years in Durango, as well as Big Luna’s extended family on the Navajo Nation reservation in the Four Corners region.
“It was really hectic,” he says. “In all honestly, it’s almost as if everybody was grabbing my hair and my feet were dangling on the ground. I couldn’t touch the ground, so to speak. I had my advisor, I had my wife, I had the kids. It’s just like everybody’s grabbing a piece of me. Sometimes it felt like it was overwhelming, but not enough to drown. And I realized that when you have so many different responsibilities, you have to allocate your energy. It’s hard to be a really good dad, a really good researcher, a really good student.”
He learned to cook multiple dinners ahead of time. His kids made friends at school. One daughter got her driver’s license, freeing up more of his time. And he started to make headway in the research lab, under the direction of Consolidated Papers Professor Mark Anderson, who was also Nollet’s advisor.
Big Luna’s research centered on integrating ultra-thin fiber-optic sensors into nuclear fuel pins to measure temperature and strain at thousands of points along the pins. Gathering such comprehensive data could better inform maintenance decisions at a nuclear power plant, though Anderson notes the technology could be integrated into any type of energy system. After testing the sensors on campus and with collaborators at Oregon State University, Anderson’s team hopes to deploy the technology at Idaho National Laboratory’s Transient Reactor Test Facility.
As for what comes next, Big Luna is assessing his options. He’d like to continue his work with fiber-optic sensors, possibly at a national laboratory. He could pair his technical skills with his business background and work in scientific consulting. And he’s interested in teaching, especially somewhere on or near the Navajo Nation reservation, given the dearth of Native Americans with PhDs in STEM fields.
Regardless, he’s thankful for the sometimes-chaotic journey that led him to this point.
“Looking back now, things fell together right and properly,” he says. “And it feels good.”
Top photo: Joel Hallberg