The Editors of the Journal of Nuclear Materials are pleased to announce Professor Xunxiang Hu as the inaugural recipient of the Rising Stars in Nuclear Materials Award (2022).
The Rising Stars in Nuclear Materials Award recognizes the accomplishments and promise of researchers in the early stages of their independent careers and aims to draw international attention to the work they are doing.
The award had several stages, firstly seeing nominees pitch an idea for a publication that details their work undertaken to date. Editors of the Journal of Nuclear Materials invited a selection of these nominees (whose research was deemed as having potential to influence future research directions in nuclear materials) to submit a single-author Mini-review paper relating to a question they are exploring through their research (typically from the last 2-3 years). The Mini-reviews invited for inclusion in the JNM Rising Stars initiative are now published and featured in a dedicated special issue of the journal relevant to their work.
The final stage of the award saw one author and Mini-review selected for the final prize - based on degree of scientific innovation outlined in the Review, impact of the research, and the overall quality of the Mini-review. The Senior Editors of JNM were the final judges determining the recipient of the prize.
Professor Xunxiang Hu won the award for his Mini-review - Recent progress in experimental investigation of neutron irradiation response of tungsten
We would like to congratulate all of those whose Mini-reviews were published in the Rising Stars Special Issue, as well as Xunxiang Hu for achieving the overall prize!
- See the full Special Issue here:
- Researchers who have a Mini-review published as part of the initiative received a JNM Rising Stars certificate, and their Mini-review is promoted as Open Access.
- The overall prize included a token award of US$1,000, and the winner has also been invited to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of Nuclear Materials.
- The next Rising Stars in Nuclear Materials Award will be launched in 2023.
About the overall winner:
Xunxiang Hu is a professor in the College of Physics, Sichuan University. He received B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai (2007), M.S. in Nuclear Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, Beijing (2009), and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (2013). After getting his PhD, he worked as a post-doc research associate in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville for one year. Over the period of 2014 to 2021, he was a Staff Scientist/Wigner Fellow at the Materials Science and Technology Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His Specialities include high temperature neutron moderator; neutron irradiation effects; helium effects; hydrogen isotope retention and transport; positron annihilation spectroscopy; and cluster dynamics modelling