Leader in Applied Nuclear Physics Wins Prestigious Award

Mark Chadwick, leader of the Computational Physics (X-CP) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), has been honored with an E.O. Lawrence Award. (LANL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program is part of X-CP Division.) Chadwick’s award is in the national security and nonproliferation category for innovative scientific contributions to advance understanding of fission product yields and other key nuclear reactions resulting in the resolution of a longstanding problem in national security. His work on modeling neutron cross sections on plutonium, americium, uranium and radchem materials, with measurements by collaborators at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE), has established robust metrics for validating simulations.

Chadwick chairs the national collaboration that oversees the development of Evaluated Neutron Data Files (ENDF), the US’s evaluated cross section sets, and is lead author for the ENDF/B-VII database. Chadwick holds bachelors and doctorate degrees from the University of Oxford.

The X-CP Division develops the multi-physics simulation codes at Los Alamos, including the MCNP neutronics code and the Rage and Flag hydrodynamics codes, as well as some of the underlying materials, equation of state, plasma, atomic and nuclear models, databases, and algorithms.