Personal information
Biography
Mark A. Prelas is professor and director of research for the Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute at the University of Missouri. He is also an adjunct professor of nuclear engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and an adjunct professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Dr. Prelas received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1979. He has received numerous awards and recognition including being named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1984, was a Gas Research Institute Fellow in 1981 working on the production of fuels from inorganic resources, was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of New South Wales in 1992, was named a fellow of the American Nuclear Society in 1999, was a William C. Foster Fellow with the U.S. Department of State in 1999-2000 where he served as a science advisor for the Bureau of Arms Control and he received the Glenn Murphy Award from ASEE in 2009 for his contributions to nuclear engineering education and research. He has also served as the senior scientist on a Strategic Defense Initiative project at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1987. In 2008 he was awarded the Frederick Joliot-Curie Medal from the Government of Russia and the Editorial Board of International Scientific Journal for Alternative Energy and Ecology for his contributions to the field of direct energy conversion and his pioneering work on the fabrication of photovoltaic cells from wide band-gap materials. He was awarded a TeXty by the Text and Academic Authors Association for Energy Resources and Systems Volume II: Renewables for best textbook in engineering and computer science in 2012. In 2017 he was named a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has over 30 years experience in direct energy conversion, the synthesis and applications of wide band-gap materials (including the fabrication of photovoltaic cells), directed energy weapons, advanced nuclear reactors (including space based systems), advanced nuclear reactor materials (including radiation hardening), hydrogen (storage and production), nuclear batteries, nonproliferation, chem/bio/nuclear sensors and gaseous electronics. He has published over 200 papers, 10 books and holds 20 national and international patents.