Lauren Fortier

Lauren Fortier is a graduate student in nuclear science and engineering creating verifiable supervisory control frameworks for autonomous nuclear power plant operations. Her research addresses a critical challenge: reducing operator dependence and staffing costs while building trust among regulators and industry stakeholders. She designed finite state machine-based supervisory controllers for the MIT research reactor startup, validating performance against reactor simulators. Building on this work, she uses simulation and state-machine modeling for control system development and is extending her framework through thermal-hydraulic modeling and optimization for online decision-making. Her approach employs limited lookahead policies and optimization algorithms to enable dynamic, adaptive plant management beyond pre-generated procedures. As a MathWorks Fellow, Lauren will scale these finite state automata frameworks to higher-dimensional systems. Her methodology has the potential to extend beyond nuclear to industrial and aerospace applications, demonstrating how formal verification can enable autonomous systems.