Katy Huff

Biography

Dr. Kathryn D. Huff is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she leads the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group in modeling and simulating those systems. She holds an affiliate faculty position with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is one of the University of Illinois' most recent Blue Waters Professors.

She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow with both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California - Berkeley. She received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2013 and her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago.  

She has been a leader in the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division of the American Nuclear Society and has recently been recognized with both the ANS Young Member Excellence Award and the Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women's Achievement Award. 

Through leadership with the Hacker Within, Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Journal of Open Source Software, and other initiatives, she strives to advocate for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing. With colleagues, collaborators, and friends, she has co-authored two books to help scientists with these practices: Effective Computation in Physics, O'Reilly, 2015 and The Practice of Reproducible Research, UC Press, 2017.