Dr. Mirela Gavrilas is the Executive Director for Operations of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The EDO position is the highest-ranking NRC career position with responsibilities for overseeing the agency’s operational and administrative functions and serving as the chief operating officer.

While at the NRC, she has led efforts to review the construction permit for a first of a kind medical isotope production facility, develop the Agency’s accident tolerant fuel plan, modernize workload management processes and metrics, and address risks and hazards associated with complex regulatory topics. Dr. Gavrilas also has experience in international cooperation in severe accident phenomenology, risk assessment, and fuels and safety analysis methods. Before she moved to her current role in 2024, she was the director of the NRC’s office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response.

Dr. Gavrilas has been the head of NSIR since 2020, where she has been responsible for developing and implementing security and emergency preparedness policy. Since becoming a senior executive in 2014, she has held management positions for research and test reactors, risk assessment and reactor systems in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

Among her most notable contributions to the NRC mission are the Be riskSMART decision making framework, a methodology for the probabilistic treatment of safety margins, the construction permit review for the SHINE medical isotope production facility, NRC’s original accident tolerant fuel plan, and security considerations for licensing advanced reactors. She has also previously led efforts to develop new regulatory frameworks for accident tolerant fuels and novel Molydenum-99 production facilities. She began her NRC career in 2004 as an engineer in the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research.

Dr. Gavrilas holds a Bachelor of Science degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park and a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also served as a post-doctoral fellow. Prior to joining the NRC, she taught nuclear engineering classes, advised master’s and doctoral candidates, and conducted experimental and computational thermal-hydraulic research as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland at College Park.