Bio
Dr. Ryan L. Karkkainen is currently a Senior R&D Staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Florida, along with an M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Tennessee, and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University.
He has worked for 20+ years in composites and advanced materials development, forensics, and multi-disciplinary engineering projects with full-spectrum job experience in industry, government lab, academia, and private consultancy roles. These include Ford Motor Company, the Army Research Laboratory, and the University of Miami. He has led multi-institutional teams in a range of projects including the development of highly-aligned short fiber composites, structural composite batteries, high-power cubesat thermal management, robotics, and automotive safety systems.
Dr. Karkkainen’s research interests include composite materials, boron fiber ceramic matrix composites, safety engineering for nuclear storage and transportation, autonomous rover systems for monitoring, additive manufacturing for graded-Z radiation shielding, high entropy alloys for temperature stability, advanced mechanics simulation and experiments for storage and transport design, and general microstructure-process-property linkages in advanced materials and processes.