2022 ANS Annual Meeting

Alyssa Hayes

Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. Candidate

University of Tennessee

Alyssa Hayes (she/her) is a Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Tennessee, where she is researching impurity transport in the plasma boundary of fusion reactors. She is a member of the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she takes advantage of high-performance computing resources to simulate wall erosion and impurity migration.

She is now a leader of the Computational Research Access Network (CRANE), a national student-led workshop series that teaches computational skills to students from underrepresented groups in plasma physics and nuclear engineering.

Her advocacy efforts began in 2016 when she joined forces with other nuclear advocates to help save the Clinton and Quad Cities NPPs. She testified in 2021 before Illinois Congressmembers to help save Byron and Dresden, and again in 2022 in a push to lift the Illinois moratorium on new nuclear construction.

Alyssa earned her B.S. in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering from the University of Illinois in 2019. She continues to be an active member of ANS, WIN, CRANE, and Generation Atomic, and she aspires to become an ANS Congressional Fellow in the future.