 I have the pleasure of introducing Professor Alan Garner, his nuclear engineering. And we hired him at 2012 when he actually came. I was a department head for six years from 2009 to 2016 or something like that. So very pleased. And now we made the correct decision. Excellent candidate. So Professor Garner actually got his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2006. And he has a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And after that, he was working in the GRC research center at General Electric, which he spent six years doing also a great job in General Electric. And what tip the scale actually he has in hiring him, he was actually, he is a Navy officer. He's a commander. And now he's just a couple of months ago promoted to basically captain. And when I saw that, because I was a Navy officer myself, I said, this is the guy who's for nuclear engineering. So and that was right. So then he was also formulated a research group at the nuclear engineering at Purdue. And he has many. I'm not going to go through all his achievement, but he has many several honors in the national and international award. Some include IEEE, Early Achievement Award, Air Force AFRL, Air Force Research Lab, Summer Fellow, which is also prestigious for faculty to do. IEEE senior member, and several Navy and Marine Corp medals, actually five achievement and one commendation. Very good. Excellent. And also internally has the best teacher award in 2013, as well as Paul Zimola, scholars of NE. And his student also won several awards. So sorry it's a little bit long, but welcome our new associate professor at nuclear engineering. Thank you, Ahmed. So I'm going to take a little bit of a different attack than how Sally took hers, because my career is a little bit different than the common faculty career. So as you can tell from my title sign, I put both of my positions up there. I'm actually a dual career person. Obviously, you're familiar with the left, as Ahmed spent a lot of time talking about. I just received tenure and now have the fortune of being the undergraduate program chair in nuclear engineering. And I also get the additional benefit of being our academic advisor, since we currently don't have an academic advisor. So I get to do lots of new fun things there. On the right is my Navy billet or assignment. I just promoted to captain on July 1st. We had a ceremony over at Potter for that back then. And my role there, I'm what's called PEO Submarines. And that's program executive office. So basically my role is I am the senior submarine officer in the Navy Reserve engineering duty officer community. And my role is coordinating all the support that we provide to the submarine community for construction of the new ballistic missile submarine, the USS Columbia. So that's what that means. And I'll talk more about that as I go on to the following slides. So to start with, the United States Navy. So I was a Naval ROTC member when I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. So I joined Illinois in 1992, was an ROTC student that covered my tuition. So I obviously incurred an obligation of five years after that. And this has the mission of the Navy for those of you, Indiana, I'm from Illinois. Just to let you know, permission of the Navy, maintain, train, and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression, and maintaining freedom of the seas. So three quarters of the world is water. You need to move goods and services around the world. So water is still the most beneficial way. I'll just interrupt you just for a second. My apologies. All right, so sustaining combat readiness, building a fleet of the future, and developing 21st century leaders. So when I was first in ROTC, obviously, I was a nuclear engineering undergraduate. So the primary thing that interested me was going and becoming a nuclear propulsion officer. So in the Navy, you have two choices if you want to do that. You can go submarines or you can go aircraft carriers. I chose to go submarines. So here is the list of, I don't know what year this came. This was probably from about three years ago. But it's more or less relevant today. We've got fast attack submarines. These are the ones that go out and do missions. They go after enemy shipping. They go do operations off people's coasts. I was on a Los Angeles-class submarine. I was assigned there for 32 months. I've got more on that in a couple of slides down the line. You also have the Seawolf class, not many submarines there, and then the Virginia class, which is still under construction now. Ballistic missile submarines are very important in the Navy arsenal because they are part of the nuclear triad. Obviously, for nuclear deterrence, which was a big deal during the Cold War and as more and more nations start to progress towards nuclear weapons, becomes increasingly important to national security. So the Ohio-class submarines were first commissioned in the late 70s, and they're nearing the end of their useful life. So the number one priority right now in the Department of Defense is constructing the next-generation ballistic missile submarine, which is the USS Columbia. And that's where my current position comes in. When I transferred to that current position in December of 2017, my role was to try to coordinate all the reserve support for the construction of the new ballistic missile submarine USS Columbia. So that's what my role has been, is trying to develop that whole process to get the right sort of technical people out there to help with that construction. So this is something that we're required to do in my community in the Navy. This is our career planner. And this is a very nice thing in the sense that it tells you where you've been and where you plan to go. And in my case, I think this is a very nice thing to kind of outline a lot of what Ahmed was talking about earlier. So this goes back to when I first commissioned in the Navy in December of 1997 after my first master's degree at Michigan. So after that, I spent about 18 months going through Navy nuclear training. So we go through a six-month program called Nuclear Power School, which is basically all coursework. So it has materials, electrical engineering, basic nuclear physics, calculus, everything you can imagine that you need to understand to operate a nuclear power plant. Then I went to what's called prototype, which is six months, where you actually learn how to operate the things in practice. So we went and we learned all the technician or enlisted watch stations. Then we qualified to be what's called engineering officer of the watch. So the person in charge of the operation of the reactor. So after that training, then I went to submarine officer basic course. You can't see it. That's that little line there. That's three months. And that completed the full 18 months of training. That's where we learned how a submarine operated. I then went to the USS Pasadena for 32 months. I was reactor controls assistant, chemistry and radiological controls assistant, quality assurance officer and communicator. So what does all that stuff mean? RCA is the one in charge of all the electronics that measures all the reactor power and all the instrumentation controls associated with that. During that tour, we actually did a change out of our instrumentation and controls from analog to digital. So in my role at the start of that, I was the one that oversaw the removal of all that equipment. I then became CRA, which is in charge of all the water chemistry. So we use a pressurized water reactor. So you're heating up water. You've got all the water flowing through the secondary plant. So it was very important to control the chemistry to make sure you don't have erosion or activation of materials. So that also becomes very important when you've been shut down for a year and then go to restart. So I was the chemistry and radiological controls assistant when we first started the reactor plant back up after 18 months or 12 months or so being shut down. Quality assurance officer is the one responsible for making sure that when we go underwater, we come back up. So in charge of all the administration, making sure all the seawater valve maintenance is correct and all of that. I got the benefit of doing that right after we got out of the shipyard and had torn the ship apart. I was the one that was quality assurance officer when we went back out to sea and had to make sure that everything was all right. So as you can tell, there's a lot of responsibility for someone that was just a couple of years out of school. From there, I went to shore duty and that's where I have the two paths. So I did shore duty at submarine training facility where I taught nuclear reactor operations and principles to officers getting ready to qualify to be the chief engineer of the submarine, which is something I did during my junior officer tour. That's also when I went to Old Dominion University and learned about electrical applications of plasmas and pulse power and got a master's degree in electrical engineering. So that's one of the critical areas of our research group and that's how we wound up doing bioelectrics and electrophysics, which is along the lines of some of the things that Sally was talking about with plasma physics and pulse power. Then going along the bottom path, you have the standard more academic path. I got my PhD at Michigan. I worked in industry for six years and then I joined Purdue. At the top, I was in a submarine unit. Basic role of that unit was to make sure that submarines didn't hit each other during operations. Very important work, but as you can tell, those of you particularly graduate students or already faculty, it's not necessarily the most intellectually stimulating type of work. So after my PhD, when I moved in New York, I started looking around. I wanted to do something different and that's how I wound up working as an engineering duty officer. So this goes in a little bit of information here. So this is where I used to work at GE. Whoops, a little bit too much. And we still continue to collaborate with them. We're working with them on multiple projects. The biggest one right now is platelet activation using electric pulses to permealize platelets so that you can induce them to activate, to form gels that you can put on wounds. I talked more about this this morning at the BAME seminar I gave that Travis, who's one of my students, got to attend. So these are all the different projects I worked on. I'm not gonna go into too much detail but I was hired originally as a biomedical engineer so they had me working on digital pathology. They also needed someone that understood nuclear power so I helped them with a radioisotope battery source my first month there. I got a co-inventorship on a patent. I worked very briefly in radiation detection and non-proliferation at the end of one year when funding was short and so I wound up working on that. A large chunk of my work was working on thermal stress modeling and flip chips for satellites, composite modeling for EMI which has been morphed into a project that we now are doing for ONR for making nonlinear transmission lines. Membrane temperature gradients which we looked at for both lasers and microwaves and then obviously the platelet activation work. So as you can tell a lot of this leveraged skills from nuclear engineering from the Navy and has continued on here at GE and with collaborations. In my other world after my PhD I joined Naval Sea Systems Command which is the engineering arm of the US Navy. The active duty engineering duty officers are a very small cadre of officers but they control the majority of money in the Navy that goes out to building platforms, contracts and that sort of thing. Over my time it's kind of small but down at the bottom I've worked for the industrial operations NAVCO4 those are the people that do ship maintenance. I spent a lot of time working at shipyards. I currently work more for the PEO Columbia up on the left Admiral Popano and that's what we do now. We're going through and trying to get all the support for constructing the submarines. And along the way I've been involved with a lot of shipyard work. This goes through a lot of that but I spent four years commanding groups of around 200 sailors who go out and provide technical support to the shipyards. Put in that. And that has led to all of these collaborations because I've been in industry, I've been in military and we're collaborating on multiple things. We're working with agricultural companies. We've talked to a small company here at Burke. We've got multiple patents filed with them on microorganism, magnet activation and stem cell manipulation. We've got an SBIR through NASA with Eagle Harbor who builds pulse generators as well as some imaging companies that we've also worked with. And finally I'm not going to go into the detail of all of our research that we do as a group but this is the slide that I always show at the beginning of our group meetings with all the various projects that we work on. We do experiment, we do theory. We do work with Sally who just spoke of plasma modeling for combustion over on the right. We co-advise one student and another student we work very closely together. We've got 11 graduate students and the undergraduates fluctuate but probably about just as many. But the important thing that I want my students to get out of this is working across sectors which I've done quite a bit as well as working across disciplines. As you can see we've got aero, we've got ABE, we've got nuclear, chemical, electrical and health science. And with that I'm open to any questions. Thank you. How do you manage two jobs, a Navy as well as this? What are your academic jobs? Well, I get a lot of help. So when my wife had our second child in 2016, so we have a 10 year old and a three year old and right before that was when I got that AFRL summer of faculty. So her parents were retired living down in Florida so they actually came up and have been with us for most of the last four years. So without their help we wouldn't be able to handle this and plus we actually have some neighbors and friends from church that have been very helpful over the last couple years. So basically it's juggling and a lot of help. Other questions? Hello, yeah. It's really interesting to see a person from the Navy and having an experience in the industry as well as right now you are in academia. I have seen very often the people from the industry to academia transition. How about the transformation from the academia to industry? So what's your opinion on that? Okay, so actually GE in the past it was more so but GE where I used to work was actually more similar to academia than industry in some ways because we were the fundamental research arm for GE so we had little departments and we'd focus on more fundamental things. So we were somewhere in between the basic research that you do at the university and the more direct research that you would do at a profit and loss center as we refer to it at GE. So one of the things I really enjoyed about where I worked at the research center was I wasn't working for a single business unit. I did work for life sciences. I did work for plastics. I did work for Lockheed Martin as part of contracts. So from that perspective it was a lot like academia. The problem was that I had to find a way to staff my 40 hours each week and I would have to go around and find different projects which for me was fine. I worked on all sorts of projects but that didn't necessarily make the lab managers happy because it didn't necessarily fall within what they wanted the lab to do. So as a professor I don't have to worry about that as much. If I see something that's interesting I can tie it together. That's why our group is so diverse. Everything we do stems from electromagnetic radiation. It's just what we do with it that makes it different. Any other questions? I'll end it with a funny one. Can you go to slide four? Okay. Yeah this one. So I see you have like you're getting a full professor in 2024. Yes. I thought you were optimistic last week more than to get it in three years. What happened? You can answer. It's always good to aim high and then not reach. Yeah.