Dr. Krahn is Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Immediately prior to coming to Vanderbilt, he served in U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Safety & Security in the Office of Environmental Management (EM). He performs research and serves on the management board as part of the Consortium for Risk Evaluation and Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) in the areas of nuclear and environmental risk assessment and risk management and the insertion of advanced technology into nuclear facilities.
While at DOE, Dr. Krahn: served as the Deputy Chair of the Nuclear Safety Research and Development Committee which provided oversight and direction to safety-related research; directed the technology development program for the nuclear waste processing; chaired the EM Technical Authority Board, charged with providing final technical approval of new facilities and major modifications to nuclear facilities; and was selected by the Deputy Secretary to serve on the Risk Assessment Working Group, DOE’s technical leadership team for overseeing the development of improved quantitative risk analysis in the department. He has led or served on more than dozens technical reviews of nuclear facilities and radioactive waste processing systems for DOE sites including Savannah River, Hanford, Idaho, Oak Ridge and others.
He has also provided nuclear/environmental engineering and risk assessment consultation to the U.S. nuclear industry for more than a dozen years and to NASA for five years. He received his Doctorate in Public Administration from the University of Southern California and holds an M.S. in Materials Science from the University of Virginia. He previously taught systems engineering at The George Washington University and the University of Maryland.