PNNL

Dr. Ben Kowash, PhD, has a talent for addressing national security challenges involving nuclear materials, engineering, information, and people. A subsector manager and nuclear engineer within the National Security Directorate and a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Kowash navigates large organizations with ease.

His role at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) involves listening to sponsors and research communities in the areas of nuclear enterprise assurance and nonnuclear components to understand their challenges, mustering the applicable capabilities and resources, and building the science and technology teams to address those challenges. Dr. Kowash also leads the Precision Radiation Hardening directorate objective, contributes to the Tritium Technology Program, and manages a Laboratory-Directed Research and Development project to establish a laser-driven ionizing radiation microbeam for precision materials testing applications.

Dr. Kowash retired from the U.S. Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 2021, having spent his career leading activities within the Department of Defense nuclear enterprise with assignments in operations, academia, and research and development. In the last eight years of his military service, he was closely aligned with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear weapons enterprise. He spent more than three years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a design physicist before moving to the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment where he was chief of station and U.S. Air Force enterprise liaison to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence. There, Dr. Kowash reinvigorated, led, and coordinated efforts to develop and leverage nuclear weapons collaborations with the United Kingdom to support future U.S. Air Force nuclear weapon systems.

He holds a PhD in nuclear engineering and radiological sciences from the University of Michigan, an MS in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and BS degrees in nuclear engineering and mechanical engineering from Oregon State University.

• Nuclear weapon outputs and effects
• Radiation effects on electronic materials and devices
• Laser-driven particle acceleration
• Multiphysics modeling and simulation
• Nuclear instrumentation and diagnostics
• Nuclear reactor technologies

• PhD in nuclear engineering/radiological science, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 
• MS in nuclear engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology
• BS in mechanical engineering, Oregon State University
• BS in nuclear engineering, Oregon State University 

• Strategic Radiation Hardened Electronics Council – member/participant
• American Nuclear Society – member
• IEEE – member