Atoms At Work - The School of Nuclear Engineering's Summer Camp 2025

Atoms At Work - The School of Nuclear Engineering's Summer Camp 2025

The School of Nuclear Engineering hosted its annual Atoms at Work Summer camp for high-school students from across the country, offering a unique opportunity for experiential and interactive learning on nuclear science and engineering.

 

Held over two sessions due to increased demand - July 14-18 and July 21-25, 2025 - on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, the five-day program brought together high-school students alongside Purdue faculty, reactor staff and undergraduate and graduate mentors from the School of Nuclear Engineering. Students engaged in a wide range of interactive lectures, hands-on experiments, research activities, and community building events designed to showcase real-world applications of nuclear engineering.

During the Atoms at Work program campers constructed their own radiation detectors, used several types of radiation detectors to quantify and characterize radiation sources, and applied their skills to use Purdue’s subcritical pile to map neutron flux profiles and determine half-lives of unknown isotopes.The program also included a tour of the Clinton Nuclear Power Station and an experiment using Purdue’s fully digital PUR-1 reactor, where students had the rare opportunity to observe Cherenkov radiation—a characteristic visible blue glow produced by high-speed particles moving through water inside the reactor core.

Organized and led by Department Head Dr. Seungjin Kim, Associate Reactor Director Dr. Stylianos Chatzidakis, and reactor staff True Miller and Brian Jowers—with guest lectures from Drs. Allen Garner and Lefteri Tsoukalas—Atoms at Work aims to foster the next generation of nuclear engineers.

 

To learn more about the Atoms at Work Summer Camp, visit https://engineering.purdue.edu/NE/Summer-Camp/Atoms-At-Work.