2016 ANS Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award

The American Nuclear Society (ANS) is pleased to announce that Dr. Mark L. Williams of ORNL Reactor & Nuclear Systems Division (RNSD) and Dr. Luiz Leal, a retired ORNL RNSD researcher currently working for the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, have been selected as the 2016 recipients of the Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award by the Reactor Physics Division of the ANS.  Both Williams and Leal are ANS Fellows. They will be recognized at the Opening Plenary of the 2016 ANS Winter Meeting at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV, on November 7.

The award honors Williams for innovative contributions to resonance self-shielding theory and development of continuous-energy deterministic transport calculations for lattice physics applications; for his leadership in the development and generation of cross section covariance data; and for his advancements in sensitivity/uncertainty methods, including implicit sensitivity treatment and depletion perturbation theory for coupled neutron/nuclide fields.

Leal is honored for leadership in the measurement, evaluation and applications-processing of neutron cross sections. Leal has performed and led measurement programs to extend and improve resonance data for many important nuclides. Leal has developed enhancements in the theory of resonance data evaluation with algorithms with include differential and integral data uncertainties and sensitivities, as well as improvements in cross section applications-processing, resulting in more precise cross sections and more powerful fissile system analyses.