Mihai Diaconeasa
Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering
North Carolina State University
Dr. Mihai Diaconeasa obtained his B.S. degree from University College Utrecht, the international undergraduate honors college of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, his M.S. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After his graduation, Dr. Diaconeasa held the postdoctoral research scholar position at the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences from the School of Engineering at UCLA.
Over the past years, Dr. Diaconeasa has developed the methodologies needed to design and implement a suite of computer codes in the probabilistic risk, reliability, and resilience assessment (PRA) fields for nuclear, aerospace, and maritime industries. He has served as the Associate General Chair for the International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management hosted by UCLA in 2018, as the Track Chair/Co-Chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Design, Reliability, Safety, and Risk at the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition since 2020, and Publications Chair of the American Nuclear Society International Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis Conference in 2023 and upcoming Advanced Reactor Safety Embedded Topical in the 2024 ANS Annual Meeting.
Additionally, Dr. Diaconeasa is the Vice Chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis Division Executive Committee, the Vice Chair of the American Nuclear Society Nuclear Installations Safety Division Executive Committee and the Vice Chair of the ANS Advanced Reactor Working Group. Also, he serves as the Chair of the ANS Standards Committee
ANS-30.2 and member of
ANS-30.1 Working Groups under the Research and Advanced Reactors Consensus Committee and is the Vice Chair of the
Probabilistic Design Methods Subcommittee,
Plant Systems Design ASME Standards Committee.
Dr. Diaconeasa leads the design and development of ADS-IDAC, a dynamic probabilistic risk assessment methodology and software platform for nuclear power plants and is the founder of the OpenPRA Initiative dedicated to designing and developing a wide range of traditional probabilistic risk assessment methods and open source software. For significant contributions to the simulation-based methods for probabilistic risk assessment of current and next generation of nuclear power plants, Dr. Diaconeasa received the ANS David Okrent Award for Nuclear Safety.
During his tenure at the UCLA's B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences, he has led the development of the Hybrid Causal Logic Analyzer system risk and reliability software used to enhance the design process and assess the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts usage in space systems for extended deep space missions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Phoenix human reliability analysis (HRA) methodology and software adopted by the Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (JNRA).