About CASL
Organization
Senior Leadership Team (staff listing)
Dr. Douglas Kothe
CASL Director
Dr. Kothe comes to CASL from the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), where he served as director of science and oversaw multi-disciplinary teams pursuing breakthrough science research at the U.S. DOE Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL. Dr. Kothe is a practiced line and program manager of R&D in the computer and computational sciences, with experience at LANL in the technical leadership of its annual $200M DOE NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing Program within a Stockpile Stewardship Program. He helped to provide simulation capabilities and resources to support the annual stockpile assessment and certification, to study advanced nuclear-weapons design and manufacturing processes, and to analyze accident scenarios and weapons aging.
He has twenty-five years of computational science and applied mathematics research in fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, and materials manufacturing and response. He has conducted applied physics research at LLNL in support of nuclear weapons primary design and testing as well as original research on the development of physical models and numerical algorithms for the simulation of a variety of physical processes in the presence of compressible and incompressible fluid flow.
Douglas Burns
CASL Deputy Director
Doug Burns is a senior project manager at the INL. He began his career operating reactors for the US Navy, and moved to the INL in 1993 as a risk assessor and safety analyst. Since then, he's completed a series of project and organizational leadership assignments that have included management of CERCLA and RCRA remediation projects at the INL, Rocky Flats, and Mound laboratories, management of special nuclear materials at the INL, and support for licensing of US commercial nuclear power new builds. For the past five years, he's served as the operations manager for the DOE Fuel Cycle Technologies Technical Integration Office. Doug holds a bachelor's degree in geological engineering from New Mexico State University, a master's degree in environmental health engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA from Idaho State University. Finally, he's pursuing a PhD in nuclear engineering from Idaho State University with a focus on use of Bayesian probability analysis to support nuclear operations emergency response.
Dr. Paul Turinsky
CASL Chief Scientist
Dr. Turinsky is a professor in and former head of, the Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). He has 40 years of experience in the nuclear field, some 8 years working directly in the nuclear power industry and 32 years as a faculty member, where he has retained strong interactions with industry and government laboratories. Among his areas of expertise are reactor core physics, development of core analysis methods in support of routine operations and nuclear safety analysis, nuclear fuel management optimization, V&V and UQ, and management of R&D on fuel and reactivity control materials products and nuclear safety-related simulation capability.