Micah D. Gale

PhD Student, Nuclear Engineer at Idaho National Laboratory

mdgale@wisc.edu

440 Engineering Research Building

1500 Engineering Dr
Madison, WI 53706

Research Interests

Monte Carlo Methods
- Nonorthogonal functional expansion tallies (FET)
- Computer Aided Design (CAD) based transport
- Ray tracing
Neutronics Methods
Neutronics as a tool
- Computer Integrated Engineering workflows
- Software Defined Modeling
- Radiation Damage Modeling
- Software Quality Assurance

Academic Research

Micah is currently researching the feasibility of using Non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) as a possible basis for functional expansion tallies (FET) in Monte Carlo radiation transport. NURBS are primarily used in CAD as the mathematical way to represent the complicated surfaces that can be present in CAD, and they have shown to be very useful in this role. NURBS as a class of FET bases show great potential for being generalized FET bases.

Publications

Micah D. Gale, Patrick C. Shriwise, and Paul P. H. Wilson, “Working with Bézier Curves as Nonorthogonal Bases for Functional Expansion Tallies”, International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025), Accepted.

National Laboratory Projects

Micah is the lead developer of the Open-Source Python library: MontePy. MontePy is the most user-friendly Python library for reading, editing, and writing MCNP input files in an object-oriented way.
- Publications:
  - Micah D. Gale, Travis J. Labossiere-Hickman, and Brenna Carbno, “A Practical Guide to Parsing MCNP Inputs: Lessons Learned from Implementing Context-Free Parsing in MontePy”, International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025), Accepted.
  - Micah D. Gale, Travis J. Labossiere-Hickman, Brenna Carbno, and Andrew J. Bascom, “MontePy: A Python library for reading, editing, and writing MCNP input files”, Journal of Open Source Software, submitted.
Micah previously worked in the Irradiation Experiments Neutronics Analysis department. In that work he conducted neutronics analyses to support irradiation of fuels and materials experiments using MCNP and SCALE.
Education and Prior Work
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (PhD Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics, 2023 – present)
Nuclear Engineer, Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID (2019 – present)
Materials Data Engineer, TerraPower, Bellevue, WA (2018)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (BS Nuclear Science & Engineering, 2014 – 2018)