Clean Energy and Nuclear Power Conference

Rusty Towell is the founding director of Abilene Christian University’s (ACU) Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Lab, which is building the first university advanced reactor in the country. Towell has a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from ACU where he has been a professor for the past 23 years. He earned a PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Texas. Towell served in the US Navy as an instructor at the Naval Nuclear Power School and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with Los Alamos National Laboratory while working at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Concurrent with his career at ACU, Towell has contributed to a number of international research projects conducted ed at many different national laboratories. His more than 250 articles and scholarly writings have been cited more than 35,000 times by peer-reviewed publications.

Lisa Marshall is the assistant extension professor at North Carolina State University Department of Nuclear Engineering and vice president and president-elect of the American Nuclear Society (ANS). Marshall joined the department as its director of outreach, retention, and engagement, and has more than 20 years of experience in the field of student outreach.

Marshall works at the nexus of the social sciences and science/engineering, contributing as a working group member for the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency Global Forums on gender balance and nuclear perception and society. She is the co-principal investigator for the US Department of Energy (DOE)-funded Consent Based Siting for Interim Storage and served as the educational outreach director for the DOE-funded Consortium for Nonproliferation Enabling Capabilities. Marshall teaches in NC State’s first-year engineering program and codirects its study abroad program in engineering and social sciences. She serves as the former co-chair for the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee of the American Association of Geographers, cofounded the ANS Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and is an advisory member for the NC State Engineering Diversity & Inclusion Committee.

Ted Nordhaus is a leading global thinker on energy, environment, climate, human development, and politics. He is the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a coauthor of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges. Its mission statement casts a vision of a world that is good for both people and nature. Nordhaus also coauthored Break Through, which was called "prescient" by Time and "the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring by Wired". Over the years, he has been profiled in the New York Times, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, the National Review, the New Republic, and on NPR. In 2007 he received the Green Book Award and Time magazine's 2008 "Heroes of the Environment" award.

Rita Baranwal leads the development and deployment of the AP300™ Small Modular Reactor at Westinghouse and has more than 25 years of nuclear industry experience. Baranwal was previously chief technology officer at Westinghouse where she led the clean energy company’s global research and development on innovative nuclear solutions. 

Previously, Baranwal served as chief nuclear officer at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Before joining EPRI, he was the assistant secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy in the US Department of Energy in a US president-appointed and Senate-confirmed role. Baranwal is a fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and has a bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in materials science and engineering and a master’s degree and PhD in the same discipline from the University of Michigan. 

Haruko Wainwright is the Mitsui Career Development Professor in Contemporary Technology and assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a BA in nuclear engineering, an MA in statistics, and a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining MIT, she was a staff scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research focuses on environmental modeling and monitoring technologies with a particular focus on nuclear waste and nuclear contamination.

Andrew Spencer served as main propulsion assistant on the USS Jimmy Carter and shift engineer at the Navy Nuclear Power Training Unit in Charleston, South Carolina. Spencer spent a decade in commercial nuclear power as an operations instructor, having been senior reactor operator-certified on a Westinghouse PWR and a General Electric BWR. He holds a PhD in Christian ethics from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Spencer’s most recent book, Hope for God’s Creation: Stewardship in an Age of Futility, invites readers to embrace environmental ethics from a Christian theological perspective.