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Alaina Cummings selected for the 2026 Sloane Scholarship
Alaina Cummings has been selected by the American Nuclear Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers to receive the 2026 ANS/ASME Barry Sloane Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship.
Cummings
Cummings is a junior at Pennsylvania State University, where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering. She expects to graduate in the spring of 2027, after which she plans to pursue an advanced degree that will allow her to specialize in the field of fusion and plasma physics.
She gained experience with risk-informed engineering as an intern at Constellation, where she worked on projects involving risk mitigation of pellet-clad interactions through bundle design and plant control rod maneuvers. She also has research experience on plasma-facing component materials through her experimental work with Exploration of Material-Plasma Interactions and Radiation Effects on Surfaces (EMPIRES).
In addition to being an ANS student member, Cummings has served as the secretary of the Women in Nuclear Chapter at Penn State and as the outreach chair of the ANS Student Section at Penn State.
About the scholarship: The ANS/ASME Barry Sloane Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship was established in 2024 to support an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in mechanical or nuclear engineering. It also aims to encourage active participation in standards development.
It is named in honor of Barry Sloane (1952–2019), a past member of the ANS/ASME Joint Committee on Nuclear Risk Management (JCNRM). Thanks to donations from the Sloane family and JCNRM members, both ANS and ASME are able to offer separate $2,500 scholarships to two different undergraduate students for the next three years. The scholarship will be extended if additional donations are received. Details on the application and selection process can be found here.
Sloane provided many years of dedicated service, expertise, and leadership in advancing the impact of the ASME/ANS probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) standard for nuclear power plant applications and was also a member of subcommittees on standards planning, technology, and interpretation. He was an active member of the standards program for almost 20 years.
