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US trains nuclear detectives to trace 'loose' nukes


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How Julie Gostic became a nuclear ‘sleuth’

How does someone decide to make a career of tracking rogue nuclear materials – or identifying the radioactive sources used in a “dirty” bomb and understanding how radioactivity moves through the environment?

In Julie Gostic’s case, the motivation was the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The lubricant was a US Department of Energy research grant.

She earned an undergraduate degree in biophysics and toyed with the idea of a medical career. Then 9/11 struck.

“It was a call to duty,” Dr. Gostic says. “I’m horribly uncoordinated; you’d never want to put a gun in my hand. So how could I contribute?”

The answer lay in her biophysics training. That led to a master’s in radiological sciences and a job at Sandia National Laboratory. There, she worked on projects aimed at helping countries improve controls over nuclear materials in hospitals and university labs – materials that, in the wrong hands, could be used for dirty bombs. But she still couldn’t answer her own questions about how radioactive materials move through the environment.

That led her to seek a PhD in radiochemistry, with Uncle Sam footing the bill. She got it last year. “Going back to school and not coming out with any debt helped me” decide to go for the PhD, she says, in a field experts say is crucial to the future of nuclear forensics – and national security .