Colleen REYNOLDS
Postdoctoral Research Associate - Imperial College London
Project title: Atomic Scale Modelling of Defect-Solute Interactions in Zirconium Alloy
Colleen Reynolds she completed her PhD in Materials at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2023 where she used first principles and statistical mechanics methods to study phase stability of the niobium-oxygen system under the advisement. Colleen’s dissertation included an extensive investigation of Wadsley-Roth niobium oxide phases and a study of oxygen-solute interactions in dilute niobium alloys. This work has been published in Inorganic Chemistry and Acta Materialia and has been presented at international conferences. Prior to starting her doctorate, Colleen completed a Bachelors and Masters in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. After graduation, she worked as a Research Engineer at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technologies Laboratories until 2018. There she engaged in a range of experimental and computational research projects from sensor development, collaborative robotics, and thermoelectric material design and optimization.
As part of the MIDAS team, Colleen works across key challenges 1 & 3. She looks forward to expanding her expertise in computational material science to include the QMMM method which she will be using to study the interactions of solutes with dislocations in Zr alloys. This work will further our understanding of degradation and deformation mechanism in Zr alloy fuel rods at an atomic scale. A better understanding of these atom scale phenomena will inform the design of alloys which can with stand the nuclear reactor environment longer leading to safer, longer lasting fuel rods which result in cheaper, more efficient, and cleaner nuclear energy.