Rate My Professor Amanda Johnsen

Amanda Johnsen is the Bryant Early Career Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. She earned her S.B. in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 and her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Prior to her current position, Johnsen served as a research associate at the Penn State Radiation Science and Engineering Center, where she conducted research on isotope production and purification methods, applied neutron activation analysis to environmental, archaeological, and engineering projects, and taught radiochemistry courses. She was also a postdoctoral associate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Radiochemical Processing Laboratory, focusing on novel used nuclear fuel dissolution processes, medical isotope purification, environmental cleanup, and spectroscopic detection of used fuel solutions. Her graduate thesis research on neptunium precipitation chemistry was performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Johnsen's research specializations include isotope production and purification, neutron activation analysis applications, molten salt reactors, reactor production of medical isotopes, non-aqueous reduction processes, dissolution of irradiated fuels, and spectroscopic monitoring of nuclear reprocessing streams. She has received several awards, including the Outstanding Performance Award from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2011, a Graduate Student Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (2003-2006), the Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellowship from NSF in 2004, and the Roy Oxford Award from MIT Nuclear Engineering Department in 2000. Key publications include "Optimization and scale-up of a microscale ion exchange separation for an adjacent lanthanide pair" (2026, Separation Science and Technology), "Characterization of the Core Face Irradiation Fixture at the Pennsylvania State Breazeale Reactor" (2024, Nuclear Engineering and Design), "The impact of nuclear data uncertainty on identifying plutonium diversion in liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors" (2023, Annals of Nuclear Energy), and "Neutron activation analysis capabilities and applications at the Penn State Radiation Science and Engineering Center" (2018, Forensic Chemistry). Her work contributes to advancements in nuclear engineering, radiochemistry, and safeguards.