Brooks Abel grew up in McComb, MS and obtained a B. S. and Ph.D. in Polymer Science from the University of Southern Mississippi. His Ph.D. work under the advisement of Professor Charles McCormick focused on synthesizing stimuli-responsive water-soluble polymers using controlled radical polymerizations. Following his graduate studies, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Geoffrey Coates at Cornell University where he developed catalysts for anionic and cationic ring-opening polymerizations. In July 2021 he joined the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and his independent research interests lie in the areas of polymer chemistry, catalysis, and polymer sustainability.

Dr. Nicolas Abgrall is a Senior Scientific Engineering Associate of the Applied Nuclear Physics (ANP) program. He is primarily working on in-situ radiation background learning, source detection/identification, object detection/tracking, and source-object attribution algorithms. A significant part of his work is dedicated to the development of architectures necessary for the deployment of related real-time applications in the field. He also works on the development of software tools for the simulation of large scale detector deployments in urban environments. The main projects he is involved in are related to the detection/identification/tracking of radioactive material in urban environments, by leveraging data from static/mobile radiation detectors and contextual sensors deployed in the environment.

Prior to joining the ANP program in 2016, Nicolas was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the neutrino group of the Nuclear Science Division at LBNL. He worked on the Majorana Demonstrator neutrinoless double beta decay experiment, for which he served as the deputy task leader of the detector group. He helped design and characterize the Majorana low-background low-noise front-end electronics, and led the production and QA of the back-end and front-end electronics.