Dominic Brennan

Dominic Brennan is a postdoctoral fellow in Technology and International Security with the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Dom read for a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Birmingham and holds an M.Sc. in Physics and Technology of Nuclear Reactors from the same institution. He received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Cambridge University; his thesis developed bias-correcting optimization algorithms for nuclear power design and economics.

Dom’s research has been published in Nuclear Science and Engineering and in the proceedings of the International Conference of Reactors and the International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering. He has presented his research at the UK Project on Nuclear Issues Annual Conference and NATO’s Early Career Nuclear Strategists’ Workshop. Dom has advised as a Nuclear Specialist in several CBRN Red Teams for large language model development, and to provide deep tech horizon scanning in the nuclear sector. In 2022 Dom was a delegate for the American Nuclear Society at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. From 2023-2025, Dom worked as a senior technical adviser within the UK Government’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero.

Dom is always happy to talk about AI decision-making and its different impacts on nuclear security. Please do reach out if you are interested in chatting.

Plans for Fellowship: During the fellowship, Dom will research a novel framework to identify and classify the interactions between AI decision-making and civil nuclear security. The goals of this framework are three-fold: to better communicate the risks of AI-enhanced nuclear risk; to better develop robust, system-cognizant decision-making tools; and to better evaluate the trustworthiness of these tools.