Thomas M. Miller is a research
and development staff member of the Radiation Transport and Criticality (RTC)
Group within the Nuclear Science and Technology Division (NSTD) at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (ORNL). He received
a B.S, M.S., and Ph.D. all from the University
of Tennessee in 1999,
2001, and 2004, respectively. His Ph.D.
dissertation, which was sponsored by NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Center (MSFC)
in Huntsville, Alabama, via NASA’s Graduate Student
Research Program (GSRP), involved creating an event generator to model the
particle production of nucleus-nucleus collisions for nuclei as heavy as lead
with energies up to 22.5 GeV. This event
generator was then incorporated into the code HETC, which is a high energy proton
and neutron Monte Carlo radiation transport
code, to create HETC-HEDS. While working
on his M.S. degree, he was a graduate research assistant in the Applied Physics
Group in the Computational Physics and Engineering Division of ORNL. His master's thesis involved performing bulk
shielding design calculations with SN and Monte Carlo methods for
the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) around the
mercury target and along the neutron beam lines. This work assisted in the design of the
neutron beam line shutters and uninstrumented neutron
beam line plugs. After graduate school,
Dr. Miller worked at the Bettis Atomic Power
Laboratory in West Mifflin,
Pennsylvania, in the Shield
Design and Development Group. At Bettis, he used SN and Monte Carlo codes to design shielding for the
U. S. Naval Reactors Program, developed tools to create high
order arbitrarily biased quadratures, and was
the Bettis lead shielding design engineer for NASA’s
JIMO/Prometheus Project. Dr. Miller
joined the RTC Group in October 2006.
His research interests include deterministic and Monte Carlo transport
methods, particularly for charged particle transport, criticality safety, and
radiation shielding. Specific examples
include investigating active interrogation techniques for the detection of
nuclear material in maritime environments, and design of a passive activation
detector and software system for use in post nuclear detonation forensics. He
is an active member of the local and national American Nuclear Society (ANS),
and is a member of the ANS Mathematics and Computation, Nuclear Criticality
Safety, Radiation Protection and Shielding, and Aerospace Nuclear Science and
Technology Divisions.