Bio
Senior R&D Scientist Miting Du has more than 45 years of experience researching and handling radioactive materials and has broad expertise in both nuclear engineering and chemistry.
Miting joined ORNL as a research staff member in 1998, after three years as a postdoctoral researcher. He is currently in the Radioisotope Science and Technology Division of ORNL’s Isotope Science and Engineering Directorate. During his career, Miting has designed, developed and devised the separations chemistry for dozens of radioisotopes, significantly improving methods and making discoveries that continue to inform ORNL’s production of multiple important isotopes. He has developed separation and purification methods for actinium-225, actinium-227, tungsten-188, einsteinium-254, berkelium-249, uranium-230, curium-248, promethium-147, thorium-229, plutonium-241, americium-241, hafnium, platinum-195m, lutetium-177, palladium-103, antimony-125, sulfur-32, hydrogen-3 and polonium-210, among others.
His experience extends to the design of operational devices and set-up of production lines on industrial scales, including design/assembly of gloveboxes, thickness gauge/calorimeter/pressing machine for use in hot cells or gloveboxes, and the installation of rolling machine/ powder metallurgy equipment and the like. He is skilled in mechanical design with trained hand-drafting and computer aided drawing skills, and he is familiar with mechanical engineering-related industrial codes and standards.
He also has vast research experience in thermodynamics and kinetics of the complexation of f-elements (actinides and lanthanides) with organic and inorganic ligands by spectroscopy (LSC, g, UV-Vis, Raman, IR, NMR), potentiometry, calorimetry, titration and other methods, as well as the environmental behavior of f-elements in nuclear wastes, especially their characteristics in solutions of different ionic strengths or media and their modeling with Pitzer, SIT or Parabolic methods. He is well versed in applications of radioactive tracer techniques in solutions and neutron detection of moisture in piled materials.
Prior to coming to ORNL, Miting was a visiting researcher at Florida State University, where he received his doctoral degree in nuclear chemistry and analytical chemistry. He previously was a researcher with the China Institute of Atomic Energy, where he began after receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in radiochemical engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Miting has more than 70 publications and holds six patents. He has received several awards and honors for his research projects.