Amy Hixon

Research Interests

Research in the Hixon Group is built on understanding and quantifying the behavior of actinide elements (e.g., U, Np, Am) in natural and engineered systems and generally falls into one of these three themes:

• Environmental radiochemistry — We study the complexation, competition, solubility, and sorption of actinide elements in order to improve predictions of environmental fate and transport
• Chemical and physical properties of nuclear materials — We use solid-phase characterization techniques to study how materials change as a function of time and/or other variables and determine the fundamental thermodynamic properties of new materials
• Synthesis and characterization of novel plutonium compounds — The compounds we synthesize and characterize have applications to environmental chemistry, the nuclear fuel cycle, and national security