Speaker Bio

Andrew D. Nicholson, Ph.D., is a R&D Staff in the Advanced Radiation Detection, Imaging, Data Science and Applications Group at ORNL.  Dr. Nicholson earned a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Tennessee in 2012 where he studied the magnetic order and superconducting symmetry of iron based high temperature superconductors.  Since 2012 at ORNL, Dr. Nicholson has studied the effect of variations in the radioactive background on mobile radiation detection systems, written automated detection algorithms for radiation detectors, analyzed large datasets to evaluate new radiation detector systems, and studied the effect of random and systematic uncertainties in nuclear safeguards measurements for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and Office of Naval Research. In addition to research, Dr. Nicholson, spent two years as a technical advisor to the Near Field, Radiological Source Replacement, Nuclear Data and Laboratory Analysis Enhancement portfolios.  His current research interests are uncertainty quantification and nuclear data, radiation detection algorithm development, particle transport/Monte Carlo methods and radiation detector development..