Dr. Youssef Ballout is the Director of Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL’s)
Reactor Systems Design & Analysis division. He joined INL in December 
2018 as the manager of the Fuel Design and Development Department.
Prior to INL, he was the President of Elysium Industries Limited where he 
was engaged in leading the design and development of a molten chloride 
salt fast reactor. He also spent twenty-six years at the Naval Nuclear 
Laboratory (NNL)/Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory where he worked on 
nuclear reactor design, reactor materials, reactor thermal hydraulics, and 
rector structural performance. During his career at NNL, Dr. Ballout also 
managed the Space Structural Materials group in collaboration with 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) supporting the 
design and analysis of the reactor for nuclear propulsion in outer space to 
explore the icy moons of Jupiter as part of the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter
(JIMO) project Prometheus. Over his career he worked on reactor design 
and reactor performance first as an experimentalist, then in modeling and 
simulation and often both at the same time. In addition to his technical 
contributions, Dr. Ballout spent many years in engineering and 
organizational leadership. Early in his career Dr. Ballout was a professor 
of engineering at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) where he taught 
engineering materials, design, and programming. He began his university 
education in Limoges, France, and ultimately received B.S., M.S., and 
Ph.D. engineering degrees from Wichita State University, Kansas