The Applied Nuclear Physics Program at Lawrence Berkeley Lab: Advancing Radiation Detection Techniques through Coupling with Computer and Robotics Technologies

Dr. Brian Quiter

Staff Applied Physicist/Engineer and Deputy Program Head of the Applied Nuclear Physics Program

Researchers in the Applied Nuclear Physics (ANP) program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have focused on developing new radiation detectors and radiation detection methods to solve problems related to mitigating the effects of nuclear disasters, preventing nuclear proliferation, enhancing nuclear security, and improving nuclear medicine. The new methods involve inducing and observing more esoteric signatures in a target medium, creating new radiation detectors to provide better information about distributions of radioactive material, and developing software and techniques to take advantage of the additional information these detection systems generate. This talk focuses on combining radiation detectors with robotics technologies to enable Scene Data Fusion (SDF) and the algorithmic work ANP has done to further improve the SDF technique for various applications.

Dr. Quiter was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.S. in Bio-Nuclear Engineering in 2003, his M.S. in 2005 for work related to the activation of neutrinoless double beta decay relevant materials, and his Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Engineering in 2010. Throughout his schooling, Dr. Quiter studied physics of, instrumentation for, and modeling of problems related to nuclear security applications such as nuclear detection problems, passive and active interrogation of intermodal cargo, pre-and post-detonation nuclear forensics, and nuclear safeguards. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled “Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence for Radioactive Materials Assay”. Dr. Quiter joined LBNL in August of 2010, was promoted to staff scientist in 2014 and Deputy Program Head of the Applied Nuclear Physics program in 2019. He has extensive experience modeling radiation transport and radiation detectors, coupling radiation sensors with robotics technologies, planning and performing radiological measurements in uncontrolled environments, and managing the vast and complicated data that multi-sensor systems can produce. Dr. Quiter leads a research portfolio comprising over a dozen scientists and engineers and maintains collaborations with academia, industry, and numerous other government laboratories.