Kathryn Higley

Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Oregon State University
Kathryn Higley’s fields of interest include environmental transport and fate of radionuclides, radioecology, radiochemistry, radiation dose assessment, neutron activation analysis, nuclear emergency response, and environmental regulations. She has held both reactor operator and senior reactor operator’s licenses and is a former reactor supervisor for the Reed College TRIGA reactor. Higley has been at Oregon State University since 1994 teaching undergraduate and graduate classes on radioecology, dosimetry, radiation protection, radiochemistry, and radiation biology. She spent fourteen years with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as an environmental health physicist at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and three years in environmental radiation monitoring at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Oregon. Kathryn Higley is a professor, and previously led the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University for a decade. She has managed OSU’s Radiation Health Physics program, including developing its online graduate degree, into the largest in the country. Dr. Higley has been at Oregon State University since 1994. She was the Chair of the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s Committee 5: Protection of the Environment, and currently is a council member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (which advises the US Government on radiation safety issues). She served as a Board Member (2020-2023) and is a Fellow of the Health Physics Society. She is a Certified Health Physicist. More recently she served as associate director of the TRACE project, Oregon State’s multidisciplinary effort to monitor prevalence of COVID-19 at OSU campuses and statewide. She recently assumed the role of Interim Director of the Center for Quantitative Life Sciences at OSU. In 2022 she was named an OSU Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering.