Dr. Rusty Towell is the founding director of ACU’s Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) Lab which is building the first university advanced reactor in the country. Rusty has a BS degree in Engineering Physics from ACU where he has been a professor for the past 24 years. He earned a Ph.D in nuclear physics from the University of Texas. He served in the U.S. Navy as an instructor at the Naval Nuclear Power School and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with Los Alamos National Laboratory working at Brookhaven National Lab. For the past 35 years, Rusty has worked at many different national labs on several international research projects. His over 260 articles and scholarly writings have been cited more than 38,000 times by peer-reviewed publications.