April Novak

April Novak is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering. She holds a joint appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Her research focuses on multiphysics modeling, thermal-hydraulics, and advanced reactor design, particularly using the MOOSE computational framework. She earned her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from UC Berkeley (2020) and a BS from UIUC (2015).

Dr. Novak’s work emphasizes porous media modeling for pebble bed reactors (PBRs), conjugate heat transfer, and Monte Carlo transport methods. She has validated models against experiments like SANA and contributed to tools like Pronghorn and Cardinal. Her research integrates high-performance computing (HPC) for reactor simulations, with recent projects on lead-cooled fast reactors and sodium fast reactor bypass flows.

Recipient of the R&D 100 Award (2023) and the Innovations in Nuclear Technology Award (2018), her teaching accolades include the Students' Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2024). She advises on multiphysics coupling between neutronics and thermal-hydraulics and collaborates on the Virtual Test Bed (VTB) for advanced reactor models.