Ahmed Shama joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in March 2025 as an R&D staff member in the Criticality Safety Analysis and Research Group within the Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division. He is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in the State of Tennessee and holds two discipline-specific PE licenses in the District of Columbia: Nuclear and Metallurgical and Materials.
He holds a PhD in Energy from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), an MSc in Nuclear Engineering from EPFL and ETH Zürich, an MSc in Engineering Physics from Cairo University, and a BSc in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from Suez University. Early in his career, he worked in the piping and pressure vessel inspection and construction sector, including offshore installations with Det Norske Veritas/Germanischer Lloyd in Oman.
Before joining ORNL, he served as a Scientific Officer/Specialist Radioactive Materials at Nagra, Switzerland, where he was responsible for used nuclear fuel characterization and the development of validation techniques. His current work at ORNL focuses on nuclear criticality safety analysis and validation, with emphasis on method development for validation coverage assessment, gap analysis, and optimized experiment design.