Samuel Shaner
Core Design Engineer at First American Nuclear
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Shaner is a core design engineer and entrepreneur with 14 years of experience bridging advanced nuclear science, process engineering, and commercialization. He co-founded Yellowstone Energy and served as an Innovation Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory while earning a PhD in Nuclear Science & Engineering from MIT focused on time-dependent deterministic and stochastic neutron transport methods. He has led R&D and process scale-up work in decarbonization technologies at Graphitic Energy, driving technoeconomic analysis, FEL-1 project management, and multi-physics modeling. A hands-on developer, Samuel has contributed substantive back-end changes to the widely used OpenMC Monte Carlo code, implementing delayed-neutron scoring and refactoring core Fortran modules. Based in Santa Barbara, he combines deep computational reactor physics expertise with practical process engineering and productization experience. Colleagues describe him as someone who moves fluidly between theory, code, and commercial execution to accelerate clean energy deployment.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Nuclear Science and Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBS Chemical Engineering, BS Chemical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara
Github Skills (10)
simulations10
simulation10
fortran10
nucleo10
monte-carlo10
scientific-computing9
openmc9
parallel-computing9
cluster-computing9
computational-physics9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
openmc-dev/openmc
Oct 2015 - Oct 2017
OpenMC Monte Carlo Code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:89 commits, 38 PRs, 10 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:Samuel focused on modifying core functionalities within the OpenMC Monte Carlo code. Their primary contributions involved removing and modifying calculations related to fission, specifically concerning delayed neutron data. These changes involved modifying the tallying system to account for delayed neutron production, which required updates to multiple source files, including `tally.F90`, `cross_section.F90`, and `fission.F90`. These modifications involved the implementation of a new scoring feature and also encompassed refactoring some parts of the source code.
computational-physicsnuclear-energyopenmcnuclear-fusionnuclear-engineering
samuelshaner/OpenMOC
Jan 2015 - Jun 2017
A method of characteristics code for nuclear reactor physics calculations.
Contributions:188 pushes, 97 branches, 2 comments in 2 years 5 months
physicscalculationsreactormethodcharacteristics
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