Four people who have done this before, in parts

Paul Keutelian

Co-Founder and CEO

Paul spent years leading a reactor physics research group at a US national laboratory, where his focus was on compact thermal reactor configurations and fuel assembly modeling for small modular designs. Before the lab, he worked at a nuclear instrumentation company designing neutron measurement systems for research reactors.

He founded Applied Atomics after recognizing that the AI data center power problem was tractable with existing nuclear engineering knowledge, but required a company built around the co-location constraint from the start. He leads business development, partner conversations, and company operations. This is his second venture.

Dr. Sofia Marchetti

Co-Founder and CTO

Sofia earned her doctorate in nuclear engineering with a focus on predictive control models for neutron flux management during load transients. Her dissertation work modeled xenon-135 poisoning dynamics under rapid power changes, which became the foundational analysis behind Applied Atomics's AI control approach to load-following.

Before co-founding Applied Atomics, she worked at the same national laboratory where she met Paul, building control software for two research reactors and one materials testing reactor. She leads all engineering development at Applied Atomics, including the reactor design, simulation environment, and control system architecture.

Jamal Osei

Head of AI Systems

Jamal joined Applied Atomics from the infrastructure team at a major cloud provider, where he designed ML systems for predictive resource scheduling across large-scale compute clusters. His work centered on closed-loop control problems where the feedback latency was physically constrained, which gave him a strong intuition for the reactor output control problem.

At Applied Atomics, he leads the design of the AI dispatch loop: the machine learning prediction model, the sensor data ingestion pipeline, the control signal generation layer, and the DCIM integration API. He also manages the simulation environment infrastructure that Sofia uses for reactor control model development.

Dr. Rebecca Cho

Regulatory Strategy Lead

Rebecca spent her career at a nuclear regulatory consultancy advising reactor developers on combined license applications under 10 CFR Part 52. She has worked on licensing submissions for multiple advanced reactor designs and has detailed familiarity with the NRC's pre-application engagement process, safety evaluation requirements, and the Part 52 combined operating license pathway.

At Applied Atomics, she manages the relationship with NRC staff, maintains the licensing roadmap, and advises the engineering team on how design choices affect licensing complexity and timeline. Her role is to make the regulatory pathway shorter by shaping the design toward what the NRC's existing review processes can handle efficiently.