NERS has had a longstanding history of making important contributions to understanding and applying the neutron transport equation for nuclear systems. These contributions have included fundamental advances in the theory of neutron transport by faculty and students in the early days of NERS, followed by 50 years of progress in computationally solving the neutron transport equation, using both deterministic and stochastic (Monte Carlo) methods. A brief summary of the early work in transport theory will set the stage for the remainder of the talk, which will focus on work in computational (deterministic and Monte Carlo) transport methods over the past 50 years. The first half of the presentation will be presented by Bill Martin, and the second half by Ed Larsen. Their presentations will include thoughts on the current status and challenges in computational transport methods.

Bill Martin is Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan. He received his BSE in Engineering Physics in 1967 and MSE and PhD degrees in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1975 and 1976. He also received an MS in Physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1969, served in the US Navy (Naval Reactors) from 1969-73, and received a certificate from the Bettis Reactor Engineering School in 1971. After his PhD, he spent one year at Combustion Engineering in the reactor physics group. He began his career at Michigan as Assistant Professor in 1977, Associate Professor in 1981, and Professor from 1989 to 2020. He served as NERS Chair in 1990-94 and 2004-2010 and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering during 1994-1999. He was the Founding Director of the Laboratory for Scientific Computation in 1986 and Founding Director of the Center for Parallel Computing in 1993. He received the ASEE Glenn Murphy Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Profession and Teaching of Nuclear Engineering in 1993 and was named a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society in 1995.

Edward Larsen received his B.S. (1966) and Ph.D. (1971) degrees in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined the New York University faculty as an assistant professor in 1971 and the University of Delaware faculty as an associate professor in 1976. He became a staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1977, and a faculty member of NERS in 1986. Larsen’s research has focused on the development of advanced algorithms for the mathematical analysis and computational simulation of problems associated with the interaction of radiation with matter (particle transport). Much of his analytical work involved the use of asymptotic expansions, to more precisely describe the relationship between transport theory and approximate diffusion theories. His computational work has led to more accurate discretization methods for deterministic transport calculations, more efficient and robust methods for accelerating the iterative convergence of deterministic calculations, and more efficient hybrid Monte Carlo/deterministic methods. His work has been utilized in modern computer codes that simulate practical nuclear reactors as well as general radiation transport problems. Larsen has co-authored over 350 scholarly papers and graduated 42 Ph.D. students, all from U-M. He was elected a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) in 1988 and has received several of the most prestigious awards in the international nuclear community, including the E.O. Lawrence Award of the U.S. Department of Energy (1994), the ANS Arthur Holly Compton Award (1996), and the ANS Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award (2009).