Bader Almutairi, a Ph.D. student in nuclear engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology from the state of Kuwait, will work with a team of international peer students to research nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear risk management while traveling abroad this summer.

By earning a fellowship with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), a public research university in Daejeon, South Korea, Almutairi will be able to perform research and present his findings at Korea’s “Nuclear Non-Proliferation Education & Research Center Conference” in August.

As part of the fellowship, Almutairi will travel to Seoul governmental institutions and policy research institutes, visit the historically significant city of Gyeongju, and tour major nuclear facilities and research institutes, including the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute and the Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control. He will also visit China and Japan to tour other universities and their nuclear research labs, government agencies, think-tanks and nuclear facilities.

“Sadly, I don’t speak Korean,” says Almutairi, a second-year Ph.D. student at Missouri S&T. “My native language is Arabic, and I speak fluent German and English. This would be my first trip to the Far East and I am very excited for this new experience and look forward to learning a lot.”

Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Almutairi was employed at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. After earning a scholarship to study abroad, he applied to S&T because the school aligned with his research interests of neutron generators, fission sources and detector deadtime correction.

Almutairi is a member of the graduate leadership development program and is the nuclear engineering department representative for the Council of Graduate Students. In addition, he serves as the director of the scientific committee for graduate students in the National Union of Kuwaiti Students in the USA.