Kord S. Smith
| Kord S. Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| Known for | Nonlinear Diffusion Acceleration (NDA), spatial homogenization methods, OpenMC/OpenMOC contributions |
| 🏅 Awards | ANS Young Member Engineering Achievement Award (1986) Fellow of the American Nuclear Society (2010) Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award (2015) |
Kord S. Smith is an American nuclear engineer and Emeritus Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[1] He is recognized for his contributions to computational reactor physics, numerical methods for neutron transport and diffusion, and the application of exascale computing to modern nuclear reactor modeling and simulation.
Smith served as the Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) Professor of the Practice at MIT and was the Chief Scientist for the U.S. Department of Energy's Center for Exascale Simulation of Advanced Reactors (CESAR). In 1988, he co-founded Studsvik Scandpower, a commercial reactor simulation software company.[2] In 2015, he was awarded the Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award by the American Nuclear Society.[3]
Education
Smith earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in nuclear engineering from Kansas State University in 1976.[4] He continued his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Master of Science (S.M.) degree in 1979 and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in nuclear engineering in 1980.[1] His doctoral research focused on spatial homogenization techniques and nodal diffusion methods for nuclear reactor cores under advisor Alan Henry.
During his time at MIT, Smith introduced the Analytic Nodal Method (ANM) and developed Nonlinear Diffusion Acceleration (NDA), a numerical acceleration technique widely adopted in light-water reactor (LWR) core neutronic analysis codes.
Career and Research
Commercial Software and Industry
In 1988, Smith co-founded Studsvik Scandpower, where he directed the development of reactor core physics simulation software.[2] The company's mathematical models and computer codes—including lattice physics and core simulation tools like CASMO and SIMULATE—became standard applications used by power utilities, fuel manufacturers, and nuclear regulatory bodies globally for reactor core design, fuel management, safety analysis, and operator training.
Academic Career and Exascale Computing
In 2011, Smith returned to MIT as the Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering.[2] At MIT, he co-founded and co-directed the Computational Reactor Physics Group (CRPG) alongside Professor Benoit Forget. Their research group focused on high-fidelity stochastic (Monte Carlo) and deterministic (Method of Characteristics) particle transport methods, contributing to open-source software tools such as OpenMC and OpenMOC.
Concurrently, Smith was named Chief Scientist of the Center for Exascale Simulation of Advanced Reactors (CESAR), a Department of Energy (DOE) interdisciplinary co-design center led by Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with IBM. At CESAR, Smith's research focused on hardware-software co-design, developing massively parallel algorithms to enable multi-physics simulation of reactor cores on next-generation supercomputing platforms.
Smith later retired from full-time academia and became Emeritus Professor of the Practice at MIT.[1]
Awards and Honors
- 1986: ANS Young Member Engineering Achievement Award
- 2010: Fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS)
- 2015: ANS Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award, cited for a career of outstanding contributions to the field of reactor physics[3]
Selected Publications
- Smith, Kord S. (1980). An Analytic Nodal Method for Solving the Two-Group, Multidimensional, Static and Transient Neutron Diffusion Equations (Ph.D. thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/15982.
- Knoll, D. A.; Park, H.; Smith, K. (2011). "Application of the Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov Method in Nonlinear Transport Acceleration". Nuclear Science and Engineering. 167 (2): 122–132. doi:10.13182/NSE10-18.
- Siegel, A.; Smith, K.; Fischer, P.; Mahadevan, V. (2012). "Analysis of communication costs for domain decomposed Monte Carlo methods in nuclear reactor analysis". Journal of Computational Physics. 231 (8): 3119–3125. doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2011.12.023.
- Walsh, J. A.; Forget, B.; Smith, K. S. (2014). "Accelerated sampling of the free gas resonance elastic scattering kernel". Annals of Nuclear Energy. 69: 116–124. doi:10.1016/j.anucene.2014.01.028.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Kord Smith – Faculty Profile". MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Chu, Jennifer (2011-09-26). "Kord Smith brings 30 years of simulation insight to NSE". MIT News. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Kord Smith wins 2015 ANS Wigner Reactor Physicist Award". MIT News. 2015-10-15. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
- ↑ "MIT researcher to discuss nuclear reactor physics challenges". Kansas State University Today. 2014-01-27. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
External links
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