Center for
Materials at Irradiation and Mechanical Extremes
A BES Energy Frontier Research Center

Steve Valone received his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1980. In 1981, he became a Director's-funded postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the physical chemistry group; in 1984, he joined the technical staff in the Materials Science & Technology Division, where he worked on a wide variety of modeling projects from composite fabrication and pit fire safety to, more recently, shock dynamics and radiation damage modeling.

Valone is the principal resident expert in DOE on atomistic models of Pu-Ga alloys. He is currently a co-investigator on an LDRD-DR project (Tim Germann, PI), where one of the primary tasks concerns interactions among grain boundaries and other defects in Al, another project where metal/metal-oxide interfaces for Pu-Ga alloys is of interest. He is also co-investigator on another LDRD-Dr project (Dan Schwarz, PI) on metal hydrides. In the CMIME program, Valone is developing and implementing a new class of atomistic models that combines the modeling requirements for both metals and ceramics. All of these projects are synergistically connected.