Growing up in Nigeria, Ericmoore Jossou wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon after reading all of the books by Dr. Benjamin Carson, especially Gifted Hands. That changed in college when he was introduced to materials science and the idea that “I can see atoms, I can move them around, and I can play with their positions in a material to change a material’s properties. For me, that was mind-blowing, and it led to what I’m doing right now, which is designing materials for nuclear reactors.”
When commercial nuclear reactors were first made in the 50s, “not a lot of detailed materials science went into them,” says the assistant professor with appointments in both MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We depended on serendipity and limited experiments to choose the basic materials for these reactors.”
Today, those reactors are old, and although engineers have been able to extend their operating lives by a few years, “efforts are underway to build new reactors,” Jossou says. And that is driving the search for new materials that can survive for a very long time in very extreme environments.
Jossou’s approach combines experiments with computational methods to “take existing materials and play with their processing parameters to improve their performance and make them last longer in a reactor.”
To that end, he and colleagues built a very small device that Jossou calls a “pocket-sized reactor” to monitor what happens to materials when they are in a simulated nuclear reactor environment.
“We can actually watch what’s going on in real time,” he says. “I call this process ‘looking while cooking’.” Just as a cook can adjust variables like ingredients or temperature if a meal is not going right, “we can watch what’s happening to a material in a nuclear reactor environment and catch when it begins to fail. Then we can fix things.”
Earlier this fall MIT News reported on the work, which was published in the journal Scripta Materiala. “By reconstructing 3D image data on the structure of a material as it fails, [Jossou and colleagues] could design more resilient materials that can better withstand the stress caused by irradiation inside a nuclear reactor,” writes Adam Zewe.
A second paper describing the pocket-sized device itself was published December 8 in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments.
Jossou also described his work at Materials Day 2025, Designing the Future of Extreme Materials. The event, held in October, was organized by the Materials Research Laboratory.
In addition, Jossou is excited to report that two members of his lab received poster awards for their work at the FY25 Advanced Fuels Campaign Annual Program Review Meeting held in November at MIT. Says Jossou, “They won two of the six awards, which for me is proof that what we are doing is working.”
For more on Ericmoore Jossou, see this video interview with him on The World at MIT.