Dr. Linu Malakkal is a computational material scientist post-doctoral research associate in the Computational Mechanics and Materials Department at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), USA. His technical skills include Density Functional Theory (DFT), Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations of material behavior in nuclear fuels and structural materials. He has also worked on the fabrication and characterization of nuclear fuels using novel sintering techniques. Dr. Linu joined INL in Jan 2021 with a principal focus on modeling the thermal conductivity degradation in U-Mo nuclear fuels in support of the United States High-Performance Research Reactor (USHPRR) Program and calculation of transport properties of defect species in support of the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation Program (NEAMS). He also works in understanding the thermal transport in irradiated nuclear fuel material for the center for Thermal Energy Transport under Irradiation (TETI). He has authored more than twenty international journal papers on the computational and experimental determination of thermal and mechanical properties of novel nuclear materials in journals such as Nature Scientific Reports, Journal of Physical Chemistry C, Journal of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, Journal of Nuclear Materials, Journal of Alloys and Compounds, and Computational Material Science. Before joining INL, he spent a year at Thermtest Inc. Fredericton Canada, where he worked as a thermal analysis scientist. Dr. Linu holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from GEC Kozhikode, Kerala, India, and a master’s degree in Nanotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (IIT-R) India, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
