Alumni Speaker Series

Daniel Hellfeld

Senior Scientific Engineering Associate in the Applied Nuclear Physics program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

“Application of Computer Vision in Gamma-ray Imaging”

Bio: I am a Senior Scientific Engineering Associate in the Applied Nuclear Physics program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. My research interests include fusing radiation detection and imaging methods with contextual sensor data for nuclear security related applications. I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2019 where I was a Nuclear Science and Security Consortium fellow.

Abstract: Growing up in Southern California, I spent countless days surfing out front of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) knowing it was a nuclear power plant but never knowing or really questioning what was going on inside the two unmistakable concrete domes. Fast forward to 2014 and I am at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on a large-scale remote reactor monitoring antineutrino detector that was the successor to a small-scale detector deployed at SONGS. With the help of the NSSC I was able to continue the work at Texas A&M University and finish my masters in nuclear engineering with a concentration in nonproliferation through the Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute. I continued my NSSC fellowship and began my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley where I worked on fusing computer vision methods with gamma-ray imaging technologies at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I am now staff at Berkeley Lab where I continue to work to improve our capabilities in radiation detection and imaging for a wide variety of areas including nuclear security, proliferation detection, emergency response and consequence management, and nuclear contamination remediation.