Jonathan Cirtain Email Address

Vice President, Advanced Technology Programs, BWX Technologies

BWX Technologies Inc.

Technology executive with experience within multiple markets and technologies, including manufacturing technology, space systems, machine learning, earth science, space science, commercial space imaging, nuclear medicine and defense & security. Recently, Dr. Cirtain has been instrumental in the deployment of a novel radioisotope pharmaceutical, Tc-99m pertecnotate, and it’s associated medical device called a generator. This production campaign has been a $200M+ production facility construction and commissioning beginning in 2018. Dr. Cirtain has overseen development of the radiochemistry as well as the production manufacturing systems. In 2020 through 2021, Dr. Cirtain served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Space Nuclear Propulsion and was a contributing author to the report issued by that committee. He is widely recognized as a technical and policy leader for space nuclear power and propulsion systems and has presented globally on these topics. Dr. Cirtain started the Advanced Technology business unit in November 2017 and grew the unit to a annual revenue to over $40M by 2020. This business unit executed much of the Research and Development for the corporation as well as proposed and won programs with NASA, the DoD and DOE. From 2018 until 2019, Dr. Cirtain served as Director of the Transformational Challenge Reactor Program for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In this role, he started a program to design and manufacture a operational nuclear fission reactor using machine learning techniques for Quality Assurance and Control while developing the technologies to manufacture reactor core components using additive and advanced manufacturing technologies. He holds numerous patents in this area. Prior to joining BWXT in 2017, Dr. Cirtain co-founded a machine-learning/Artificial intelligence company, Astraea, Inc. This company has developed novel approaches to Earth observing satellite data. Dr. Cirtain served in many roles during a tenure with NASA from 2007-2016. He was a prolific sounding rocket experimentalist, launching 6 highly-successful sounding rocket experiments to study the plasma physics of the sun’s outer atmosphere. One of these experiments, the High-Resolution Coronal Explorer (Hi-C). Was featured in Nature magazine for foundational observations of energy release mechanisms in stellar atmospheres. He was later awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Harvey Prize for novel contributions to instrumentation and observational astrophysics.