Katy Huff
Associate Professor
Urbana, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKaty Huff is an Associate Professor in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with 16 years of experience bridging computational science, systems analysis, and nuclear policy. She applies deep software and data skills (C/C++, Python, CMake, HDF5, LaTeX, git) to research on advanced reactors, fuel cycles, waste management, and repository performance, and has led national-level nuclear energy policy work during a multi-year assignment at the U.S. Department of Energy. An active open-source contributor, Katy has improved tooling for the SciPy proceedings and helped harden PyNE—work that reflects her focus on reproducible scientific computation and cross-platform build/packaging. She mentors students in computational nuclear engineering and seeks to connect Illinois undergraduates and graduates with research, training, and employment opportunities. Less obvious: her background spans hands-on experimental and instrumentation work (from cosmology to neutron science) through to high-level energy policy, enabling rare fluency across lab, codebase, and government arenas.
16 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Nuclear Engineering, PhD Nuclear Engineering at University of Wisconsin-MadisonHigh School Diploma STEM, High School Diploma STEM at Texas Academy of Mathematics and ScienceBA Physics, BA Physics at University of Chicago
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
351reputation
11kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
latex10
c-language10
cmake10
cprogramming-language10
python10
documentation10
hdf9
numpy9
testing8
cython8
sphinx7
php6
googletest6
clang6
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
pyne/pyne
Aug 2012 - Jun 2019
PyNE: The Nuclear Engineering Toolkit
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:80 commits, 8 PRs, 8 pushes in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Katy primarily focused on addressing an "isnan not defined failure" within the codebase by implementing platform-specific solutions. They implemented cmake support files, including files for finding dependencies such as HDF5, numpy and the beginning of cython modules. The user made changes related to documentation and installation instructions and included examples. Finally, the user updated and incorporated GSoC templates.
pythonnuclear-engineeringpyneengineeringnuclear
scipy-conference/scipy_proceedings
Apr 2015 - Jul 2017
Tools used to generate the SciPy conference proceedings
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:144 commits, 63 PRs, 36 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Katy primarily focused on enhancing the LaTeX-based proceedings generation tools. Their work involved extending the functionality of the `publisher/writer/__init__.py` file to incorporate features such as author corresponding status and equal contributor designation. This involved modifying data structures and templates to support these new authoring options. The changes also include minor refactoring and content updates to the conference introduction file.
proceedingspythonscipy
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.