Alumnus First to Receive Prestigious NNSA Fellowship in Vienna

Recent Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies graduate Thomas Gray MANTPS ´15 is headed off to a two-year National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) fellowship in Vienna, Austria. He is the first person to receive this highly competitive new fellowship created to honor Dr. Ian Hutcheon, a former researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Gray will work as a Junior Professional Officer with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“It was an amazing experience to meet Dr. Hutcheon’s family, many of the people who had worked with him at the lab, and Secretary Moniz at the award ceremony in Livermore, California,” says Gray, who is very excited about moving to Vienna next month. Through the International Professional Service Semester program, he interned with the Safeguards Department of the IAEA while still a student and found it an “amazing place to work, with many passionate and incredibly experienced people.”

He says he cannot stress highly enough the value that the Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) added to his degree. “Through CNS, I was able to meet and work with highly regarded professionals and begin really working in the field years before my colleagues who attended other graduate schools.” The relationships he built with faculty and staff in Monterey as a student have continued to grow. “They have always been willing to take the time to continue giving me advice and encouragement about my career.”

Before coming to the Institute, Tom attended Rice University in Houston, Texas. After graduating, he was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy and spent seven years on nuclear submarines, where he became intensely interested in international nuclear nonproliferation efforts.

As a fellow at the NNSA, Gray has been working and living in Washington D.C. since graduating in May of 2015. “There is a great community of MANPTS colleagues in D.C.,” says Gray, who has been living in a house with four classmates from the Institute, and says that through their networks he is constantly meeting other people connected to the school. “I cannot count the number of times I met someone professionally who I found out much later went to the Institute.”