Muriel Y. Ishikawa
Senior Scientist and Inventor
During her 18 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. Muriel Y. Ishikawa was a project and program leader of new-concept technical innovative projects, which resulted in issued patents in novel explosives, laser technology and applied nuclear chemistry. As a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, during research and teaching leave from LLNL, she collaborated on the invention and design of a new class of nuclear power reactor, worked with Russian and NASA space scientists on Mars mission planning and autonomous robotic vehicles, and collaborated on hybrid rocket propulsion.
Prior to Lawrence Livermore, Ishikawa spent a decade with the NASA-Ames Research Center, where she was a developer of 3D turbulence models and co-author of what is believed to have been the first full 3D Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics modeling code. She also collaborated with Jet Propulsion Laboratory Space Lab 3 experimenters on concentric drop dynamics experiments, which included those she originally proposed.
Ishikawa is the author or co-author of over 100 publications, documents and invited talks primarily in, but not restricted to, areas of national defense, applied nuclear physics, applied nuclear chemistry, 3-D non-invasive high-resolution imaging, turbulence modeling and fluid dynamic simulations, global climate change, environmental monitoring from space, large scale data mining, sensors, acoustics, propulsion, nuclear reactors, space science, and novel explosives.
She earned her B.A. from Mills College in Physics, and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department of Stanford University. She was a NASA Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Dr. Ishikawa shares NASA awards with JPL’s Drop Dynamics experimenters for Space Shuttle experiments, including the award for the first experimental save done onboard a Space Shuttle in orbit. She and her Lawrence Livermore team received the R&D 100 Award in 1999 for the Gamma Watermark, recognizing it as one of that year’s 100 most technologically significant new products and processes.
