Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Ryan McClarren
Dr. Ryan McClarren is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He earned his doctorate in nuclear engineering and radiological sciences from the University of Michigan in 2007. Dr. McClarren earned his bachelors and masters from University of Michigan in 2003 and 2004, respectively.
Dr. McClarren spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) after earning his doctorate. While there he worked on numerical methods for radiation transport in high energy density physics. Also while at LANL he worked on algorithm development for the Roadrunner supercomputer: the first computer to achieve a petaflop (that is 10^15 floating point operations per second) and currently the world's fastest computer.
At Texas A&M Dr. McClarren's work has focused on understanding how computer simulations can be used to make predictions in regimes where experiments are difficult or impossible. Currently, this the work is being applied to predicting radiating shock experiments where laser driven shock waves propagate at speeds hundreds of miles per second. Beyond the predictive modeling of these experiments, Dr. McClarren is developing a theory for how these shocks behave---a theory that has application to shock waves in supernova and inertial confinement fusion. Dr. McClarren also continues to work on improved numerical methods for radiation transport.
