Ciara Sivels

Ciara Sivels is an American nuclear engineer, born in 1990 and raised in Chesapeake, Virginia, who works at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at the University of Michigan, where her doctoral work with Sara Pozzi centred on beta-gamma coincidence detectors and nuclear forensics, using radioxenon to support nuclear explosion monitoring and nonproliferation in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In 2018 she became the first black woman to earn a doctorate in nuclear engineering at Michigan. She is a member of the National Society of Black Engineers. In 2019 she was chosen as one of 125 American Association for the Advancement of Science IF/THEN Ambassadors, and the US Office of Nuclear Energy named her a Millennial to Watch that year. Her current work is funded through the Department of Defense and is described as highly classified.