Nathan Capps, a senior R&D staff member at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been selected to receive the American Nuclear Society’s 2025 Landis Young Member Engineering Award. The award will be presented at the 2025 ANS Annual Conference on June 16 in Chicago, Illinois.
The honor recognizes early-career engineers demonstrating outstanding achievement in effectively applying engineering knowledge to yield an engineering concept, design, safety improvement, method of analysis or product utilized in nuclear power research and development or commercial application.
Capps is being recognized for his leadership in advancing the safe and economic expansion of nuclear power by leveraging advanced modeling and simulation to facilitate accelerated testing and licensing of high burnup and accident-tolerant fuel, representing key Â鶹ӰÒôs for the future of commercial nuclear energy.
Capps will be recognized along with Dr. Christopher Perfetti from the University of New Mexico and Dr. Fan Zhang from Georgia Institute of Technology.
At ORNL, Capps leads the Advanced Fuels Campaign and maintains deep collaborative ties to the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program to integrate high-fidelity modeling with experimental data to improve understanding of nuclear fuel behavior under extreme conditions. His research supports U.S. regulatory and industry stakeholders in addressing technical challenges in support of extending burnup and large-scale power uprates of the existing fleet of Light Water Reactors. He joined the Lab in 2019 and holds a Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit .
