Rate My Professor Ryan McClarren

Ryan McClarren is Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where he serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the department. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in August 2017 following his appointment as Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University, during which he received the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Young Faculty Fellow award for research excellence in 2017. Prior to academia, McClarren was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Physics and Methods Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in 2007, M.S.E. in 2004, and B.S.E. in 2003 from the University of Michigan. McClarren is actively involved in Notre Dame's Energy program and Radiation Laboratory, contributing to initiatives in fusion energy, fission energy, and numerical simulation of nuclear energy systems.

McClarren's research centers on particle transport for neutrons and x-rays, uncertainty quantification, high-energy density physics, high-performance computing, machine learning, and predictive computational science. His group develops algorithms for exascale supercomputers, uncertainty quantification methods for simulations, and machine learning enhancements for radiative transfer and neutron transport in fission and inertial confinement fusion systems. He has authored key textbooks including Uncertainty Quantification and Predictive Computational Science (Springer International Publishing, 2018) and Computational Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Science Using Python (Academic Press, 2017). Selected publications encompass "Robust and accurate filtered spherical harmonics expansions for radiative transfer" (Journal of Computational Physics, 2010), "Calculating time eigenvalues of the neutron transport equation with dynamic mode decomposition" (Nuclear Science and Engineering, 2019), and "Self-similar solutions for high-energy density radiative transfer with separate ion and electron temperatures" (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2021). His publications appear in engineering, physics, mathematics, and statistics journals. McClarren received the American Nuclear Society Young Member Research Award from the Mathematics and Computations Division in 2019 and serves as deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Center for Exascale Monte Carlo Neutron Transport. He is a member of the American Nuclear Society and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.