From Denmark to Japan, the UK, France and Sweden, Ken Andersen has worked at neutron sources around the world. Now, he’s leading two American flagship neutron facilities — the Spallation Neutron Source and the High Flux Isotope Reactor — as the associate laboratory director for neutron sciences at ORNL.
“I’ve always liked working things out, solving complicated problems. Math had sort of a certain glamour, I thought, and it always seemed to me like that’s what the clever people were doing. I had a great math teacher in school, and I think that’s what inspired me early on.”
Andersen earned his B.S. at Keele University in the UK, where he says he fell in love with physics and “messing about with equipment and trying to understand how things work.” His years as a Ph.D. student were spent at Keele and the Institut Laue-Langevin — or ILL — in France, where he was introduced to the joys of neutron scattering.
Andersen began his career as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics in Tsukuba, Japan. That’s where he discovered his affinity for building instruments.
“At the time, some of the instruments there were sort of held together with sticky tape and string. If you wanted to build anything, you had to physically unstack the instrument, the shielding and the sandbags. You literally had to build the instruments by hand.”
For almost 30 years, he’s specialized in developing beamlines for user programs at world-leading centers including the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, the ILL, and the European Spallation Source, Sweden. He joined ORNL as the Neutron Technologies Division Director in 2020. There, he helped guide development of the Spallation Neutron Source’s Second Target Station.
As a young scientist at ILL, Andersen learned from the late Otto Schärpf. They worked together on beamline D7, the first instrument in the world to do polarization analysis over a wide-angular-coverage detector. At ISIS, he worked on an instrument project similar to D7, investigating the feasibility of using polarized helium-3 gas instead of polarized supermirrors.
“I chose that instrument project because it pushed the envelope. During my career, I’ve taken leaps of faith. I believe very much in taking opportunities when they come your way, and considering the opportunities at Oak Ridge in both neutron sciences and the Second Target Station, I’m really pleased I made the jump.”
Andersen is married, wi4th three adult children. He’s fluent in Danish, French and English, and familiar with Swedish, German and Japanese. Musically inclined, he plays classical piano and occasionally folk music on the violin. He even briefly played the bass guitar — “terribly” — in a rock band with his friends. And, as a runner, you might see the Copenhagen native jogging up Spallation Drive — in the cold, in shorts and a T-shirt.
“I’m very excited about having a part in helping to drive the organization forward. My aim is to lead ORNL’s neutron user facilities to the highest possible levels of performance and source availability and help increase their scientific impact even further.” — Jeremy Rumsey
