Dr. Brian Woods was appointed to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Joseph Biden on October 25, 2022.
Dr. Brian Woods is the school head of and professor in the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Oregon State University. He holds the Henry W. and Janice J. Schuette Chair in Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State.
Dr. Woods has worked at the U.S. Department of Energy as an engineer within the Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management as well as serving for four years in the U.S. Navy as a diver. Prior to coming to Oregon State, he worked as a Nuclear Safety analyst at Dominion Energy's Innsbrook Technical Center outside of Richmond, Virginia. Dr. Woods has been at Oregon State University since 2003 teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on applied thermal hydraulics, nuclear reactor safety, fluid dynamics, nuclear rules and regulations, and the societal aspects of nuclear technology.
His areas of research interest include experimental and computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer, advanced reactor design, and nuclear reactor and fuel safety. Dr. Woods is the founder of the advanced Nuclear Systems Engineering laboratory at Oregon State and has been actively involved in thermal hydraulic and reactor safety research projects sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Idaho National Laboratory, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Westinghouse, NuScale, Kairos Power, TerraPower, and General Atomics. He has authored over 140 technical publications. He is a past chair of the American Nuclear Society's Thermal Hydraulics Division, past president of the Alpha Nu Sigma nuclear engineering honor society, and a founding member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineer's VVUQ 30 subcommittee on Verification and Validation in computational simulation of nuclear system thermal fluid behavior.
Dr. Woods received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1988, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in 1999 and 2001 respectively in nuclear engineering from the University of Maryland.
Dr. Woods resides in Salem, Oregon.