Akira Tokuhiro
PhD

Biography

Few people understand the complexity of analyzing a severe nuclear reactor accident and its environmental consequences better than international nuclear energy expert Dr. Akira Tokuhiro. His contributions to the American Nuclear Society’s President’s Committee on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in Japan led him to co-author a book on the disaster. With an interest in big data analytics, he has been instrumental in guiding global nuclear energy design, engineering and safety research with U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) support, and at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, and Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute. Appointed Dean of the Faculty of Energy Systems and Nuclear Science, Dr. Tokuhiro brings over 20 years of diverse nuclear engineering experience in academia and industry to Ontario Tech. Most recently he served as Senior Principal Engineer of NuScale Power LLC, a nuclear energy startup company in Corvallis, Oregon, funded by the DOE and Fluor Corporation. In this role, he developed the technical basis of the Emergency Planning Zone of the NuScale Small Modular Reactor, which led the company to complete the first-ever submission of the Design Certification Application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) in January 2017. From 2007 to 2014, he served as Professor of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, and Director of the Nuclear Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. Previously, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas; as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, and Director and USNRC Senior Reactor Operator of the research reactor at the University of Missouri in Rolla, Missouri. Dr. Tokuhiro has earned numerous awards for contributions to his field, and for his mentorship of graduate students. He holds great interest in developing computational methods and experimental validation of nuclear reactor accidents, and energy systems analysis. His research has been published in more than 150 journal and conference papers. He completed his Bachelor of Science in Engineering (Engineering Physics) at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, then earned his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Rochester in New York State. His interests shifted to nuclear energy and he returned to Purdue to obtain his Doctorate in Nuclear Engineering.